ECONOMIC GROWTH AND ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION

In this research, we analyzed the link between economic growth and environmental protection for countries like: Austria, Czech Republic and Hungary. For the economic growth we used gross domestic products (GDP) as a proxy and for the environmental protection we decided to use general government expenditure by function such as: environmental protection, waste management, pollution abatement, protection of biodiversity and landscape and R&D environmental protection. Due to the restrictions in finding the data, we decided that the period under investigation would be 1995-2017. The empirical results confirmed the presence of a positive link between GDP and expenditures for all the countries analyzed, a fact confirmed by the other existing studies. After applying the Granger causality test, only in the case of Hungary was identified a unidirectional causality from GDP to R&D environmental protection.