Understanding energy consumption and carbon emissions in Europe: A focus on inequality issues

The present research proposes an analysis on the inequality of the consumption of electricity, different typologies of primary energy, namely natural gas, coal and oil, and carbon emissions in the period 2008–2016 within European Union. A decomposition in within and between country groups on the basis of their GDP per capita is also developed, in order to identify the main contributions to the inequality. Furthermore, carbon emissions are also decomposed according to the Kaya identity with the aim to assess which are the main sources of inequality. The analysis shows that the principal source of inequality is represented by the differences in GDP, especially for the energy consumption; whereas carbon emissions evidence a stable level of inequality during the period of analysis.