Energy, Economic Growth, and Climate Change in Southeast European Countries

This study uses annual time series data from 2000 to 2021 to investigate the relationship between primary energy consumption and growth in Albania, Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria, and Romania. These countries are economies that are located in Southern Eastern Europe and have been through a number of episodes that have made them of particular importance to the study of periods of economic expansion and stagnation. There is an extensive body of research that focuses on the relationship between the consumption of energy and the expansion of the economy. It is fact that climate change will also affects all these. The relationship between energy and growth has significant implications from various perspectives, including theoretical, practical, and policy considerations. The real gross domestic product per capita is the dependent variable that we employ in our estimated model. The independent variables that we have selected are as follows: energy consumption per capita, real gross fixed capital formation, exports, imports, and the political instability index among others. According to the findings of our estimation, political instability is a factor that hinders the process of economic growth and development in some countries. This finding is in line with our earlier expectations.