The aim of this paper is to cast light on the relationship between sustainable development environmental policy and renewable energy use. We utilize a dynamic GMM approach over a panel of 34 European Union (EU) countries spanning the period 2005-2013. Our findings reveal a positive monotonic relationship between development and pollution. Energy saving positively affects environmental degradation, while energy intensity increases air pollution. Our findings imply important policy implications to policy makers toward sustainability. Despite the fact that the Europe "20-20-20" climate and energy package strategy seems to be achieved, the recently adopted Energy Roadmap 2050 must be updated on regular basis in order to be effectively implemented and monitored by government officials and firms' stakeholders. Therefore, we argue that EU countries must increase the use of new technology and renewable energy capacity in order to align environmental policies towards more efficient energy use and sustainable development among the EU periphery.

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The aim of this paper is to empirically explore the relationship between energy demand and real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth and to investigate the role of regional externalities on per capita Final Energy Consumption (FEC) in 34 countries during the period from 2005 to 2013. The paper utilizes a Dynamic Panel Generalized Method of Moments (DPGGM) approach in order to analyse the effect of real GDP growth rate on FEC through an Error Correction Model (ECM) and spatial econometric techniques in order to examine clustered patterns of energy consumption. The results show that a) the demand is elastic both in the industrial and the household/services sectors, b) electricity and natural gas are demand substitutes, c) the relationship between real GDP growth rate and per capita energy consumption exhibits an inverted U-shape for all the sample countries under scrutiny (34 countries, Eurozone and EU28), but not for all the employed sectors of the economy, d) price (electricity and gas) and GDP growth asymmetries are supported from the employed parametric tests, and, e) distance does not affect per capita FEC, but economic neighbours have a strong positive effect.

This paper provides estimates of price-marginal cost ratios for manufacturing and services sectors in the Eurozone, the US and Japan over the period . The estimates are obtained applying τhe methodology developed by Hall (1988) and extended by Roeger (1995) indexes, and the degree of sectoral regulation. However, these indicators do not always reflect the real degree of competition in a sector (Trėsor-Economics, 2008). 3An alternative approach is to use national accounts data to infer conclusions about the difference between the selling price (P) and the marginal cost (MC), since the less competition there is in a sector, the more the price can diverge from the marginal production cost. In other words, we can use the ratio between the sale price and the marginal production cost (mark up ratio) in order to gauge the intensity of competition in a sector. As a consequence, mark-up estimates of different sectors and different countries allowing for comparisons of the degree of competition, they should help in identifying which sectors and/or countries would benefit most from changes in legislation or regulation that affect competition.The approach adopted here is to estimate econometrically the level of market power by following the methodology developed by Hall (1988) and extended by Roeger (1995). This methodology is based on the hypothesis that in a situation of perfect competition the selling price is equal to marginal cost. The equality of marginal cost and price is essential for the efficiency of the economy since, first, competitive markets can achieve higher productivity levels, and second, competition provides consumers with products of higher quality, increased variety and lower prices (Rezitis and Kalantzi, 2013). However, this condition does not apply in a less competitive environment (i.e oligopoly markets, monopolies), since the price deviates from marginal cost. Therefore, the ratio between the selling price and marginal cost assesses the competitiveness of the market. However, while selling price is directly observable, the marginal production cost is not. This drawback was overcome by Hall (1988) and Roeger (1995) who both showed that under perfect competition, the nominal growth rate of the Solow residual is independent of the nominal capital productivity growth rate. It then follows that the coefficient linking the nominal 4 growth rate of the Solow residual to the nominal capital productivity growth is the Lerner Index defined as the ratio of the price minus marginal cost to priceDespite the voluminous amount of work on the topic, none of these studies -to the best of our knowledge-has examined this relationship for the Eurozone countries. Furthermore, unlike previous studies, we use an array of econometric techniques (OLS, 2SLS and bootstrap methods) to test the robustness of the results. The scope of this paper is that its empirical findings might be used as a benchmark to otherEuropean countries in order to asses the degree of competition in certain manufacturing and services sectors...

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