Analýza Kuznetsovy environmentální křivky pro Českou republiku a Izrael

This bachelor thesis studies the impact of income per capita on carbon dioxide emissions in the Czech Republic and Israel over the last roughly 30 years. The goal is to validate that there exists a relationship between these variables, which imitates the shape of an inverted letter “u”, and thus verify the hypothesis known as the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC). The testing of the hypothesis was performed using several other variables, such as the openness of economy, financial development, foreign direct investment and energy consumption, which draw from earlier studies. All data was on annual basis, and came from IEA, World Bank and EIA open databases. In the case of the Czech Republic, 30 observations were available, and for Israel, 28-32 observations were used depending on the availability of data for the auxiliary variables. To model the relationship, the autoregressive distributed lag model (ARDL) and its modification to the error correction model (ECM) were applied. All results were then statistically tested. In both analyzed countries, the results did not confirm the validity of the EKC.