Emerson Guzzi Zuan Esteves

Considering the importance of climate change to the world and the concept of sustainability, the aim of this thesis is to perform the structural decomposition of the use of Renewable and Non-Renewable Energy and CO2 emissions between 1995 and 2009 by HDI level, using Input-Output Analysis and Structural Decomposition Analysis (SDA), which is a comparative statistical method that determines the driving forces in the historical changes in economic, energy, environmental and social indicators to evaluate the influence of the different effects of these changes (variables). The data were obtained from the World Input-Output Database - WIOD with input-output tables of 40 countries (27 EU countries and 13 other selected countries) plus the rest of the world. These countries were divided by their Human Development Index (HDI) in: Very High (31) High (7) and Medium (2). The Total Effect comprises: Intensity Effect (caused by variation in the level of the use of an indicator unit of the total production); Technological Effect (caused by changes in the structure of intermediate inputs in the economy); Final Demand Effect (caused by variation in final demand structure); and Activity Effect (caused by variation in the total production). The results show that countries with high and medium HDI were the largest CO2 emitters. Regarding the use of Non-Renewable Energy, countries with high and medium HDI were the largest consumers. Differently from what we expected , it was not countries with very high HDI that were the largest consumers of Renewable Energy, but countries with high and medium HDI. The study is innovative because it shows the dynamic behavior of Renewable Energy and Non-Renewable Energy by human development level, which can influence the policies and the international agreements concerning the adoption of energy consumption targets.