اصغر میرمحمدتبار

Expanding use of renewable energies (RE) around the world is a critical mission to reach to global environmental policies. Largest share of global energy mix relates to deployable and carbon-intensive fossil fuels. So, it is necessary to create proper incentives for investors to invest in RE in order to move toward low carbon economy. In this regard, one of the implemented policies is imposing tax on using deployable energies which includes tax on both energy consumption and motor vehicle transportation. This paper investigates impact of environmental tax policy on investors’ behavior for 13 leading selected developed and developing countries during the period 2004-2016. Based on economic theory, investment, particularly in capital-intensive energy industries would have a long gestation period. To capture this feature and evaluate dynamic relations of investments in RE, a partial-adjustment dynamic model is applied and estimated using Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) method. The results show that imposing tax on fossil fuel energy consumption and transportation systems, in particular that use fossil fuels, has a significant negative and positive impact on investing in RE, respectively. Also, empirical results demonstrate that there is a significant negative relation between interest rate (IR) and Investments in Renewable Energies (IRE).

This study aimed to evaluate the effects of environmental policies including price and non-price policies on natural gas demand in Iranian industrial sector. For this purpose, considering the dynamic nature of our panel data, we adopted Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) method to estimate natural gas consumption for 22 Iranian industries from 2005 to 2015. The results illustrated that the annual average of natural gas consumption has been rising, reaching five times higher than the consumption of other fossil fuels. Among the industries, other non-metallic minerals industry with 8 percent of the total production and more than 25 percent natural gas consumption have been regarded as the most natural gas consumer industry. The results of our GMM model showed that non-price environmental policies are more effective than the price policies on natural gas consumption. Overall, in non-price policies, energy intensity seems more important comparing to CO2 emission reduction. We recommend that governmental energy policies should focus more on energy intensity improvement in Iranian industries through technological enhancement and fuel energy saving regulations.