Considering that the European Directive has imposed that at least 20% of the total energy should come from renewable energy sources (RES) by 2020 already and the specific targets for each European Union Member State, this paper attempts to assess the importance of GDP per capita in realizing these targets and also the effects of the RES share in electricity. Contrary to previous research, this paper does not consider the connection between economic growth and RES, but rather the potential connection between the share of RES in electricity and the real GDP per capita. The panel data models indicated to a positive, but very low impact of GDP per capita on the share of RES in electricity in the period of 2007–2017 in the case of the EU countries, except Luxembourg that has outlier values of GDP per capita. However, causality between the two variables was not identified. Some groups of countries were described according to these variables using cluster analysis. Future research should focus on the extension of this model by including other important variables such as RES potential available in the countries with specific geographical conditions.

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Considering food security and climate change mitigation as the main sustainability challenges for agriculture, the main goal is to achieve agricultural production at an acceptable level of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In this paper, the effects of GHGs are described. Panel data models are built to assess the impact of greenhouse gases on harvested production of cereals in EU countries. The study is focused on the climate change cause by GHG emissions that have a direct impact on agriculture in what concerns cereal production. Therefore, the impact of GHGs on cereal production in the European Union, except Malta, in the period 2000–2016 was assessed. Moreover, the effects of GHGs on agricultural irrigated land in Denmark and Hungary, two EU countries with the large agricultural surface, were computed. The results indicated a positive impact of GHGs from agriculture and fertilizer consumption in the previous year on cereal production in the EU. Moreover, only in Hungary did the increase in GHG emissions determined a slow increase in the volume of agricultural irrigated lands in the period of 2000–2016.

A b s t r a c t. In this research we have tried to identify the relationship between the exchange rate for bitcoin to the leading currencies such as Dollar, Euro, British Pound and Chinese Yuan and Polish zloty as well. We have applied ARMA and GARCH models to model and to analyze the conditional mean and variance. The appliance of GARCH models have identified some dependency in explanation conditional variance between bitcoin and US Dollar, Euro and Yuan, while ARMA analysis have shown no relations between bitcoin and other dependent variables.