SOCIOECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AND CLIMATE CHANGE - BASIC COMPONENTS OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT IN EUROPEAN UNION COUNTRIES

The concept of sustainable development refers to a process involving changes or development. In order to evaluate whether there has been progress towards sustainable development in the EU, it would be interesting to compare the evolution of the following basic components: Socioeconomic development; Sustainable consumption and production; social inclusion; demographic changes; public health; climate change and energy; sustainable transport; natural resources; global partnership; good governance. Sustainable development is not so much a search for a stable balance, as it is a dynamic concept which acknowledges that change is inherent to human society. In this paper, the author envisages to study the link between socioeconomic development and the evolution of climate change in the EU and Romania with the help of econometric model. In order to achieve this goal we will compare two basic indicators: on the one hand, the evolution of the real Gross domestic product (GDP) per capita (which represents a key indicator of socioeconomic development) and on the other hand, greenhouse gas emissions (which is a key indicator of climate change). With the help of the Eviews statistical package, we have performed a series of statistical tests meant to provide a more accurate view on the evolution of both the GDP and the Greenhouse gas emission (GGE) in Romania from 2004 to 2012.