نقش مصرف زغال سنگ در رشد اقتصادی اقتصاد گذاری لهستان

The main goal of this paper is an analysis of the causal links between quarterly coal consumption in the Polish economy and GDP. For the sake of accurate computation an additional variable – employment – was also taken into account. Computations conducted for the period Q1 2000 to Q4 2009 by means of recent causality techniques confirmed the neutrality of hard coal usage with respect to economic growth. On the other hand, calculations for the pairs lignite-GDP and total coal consumption-GDP showed the existence of a significant nonlinear causality from coal usage to economic growth. This is clear evidence for claiming that lignite plays an important role in the economic growth of the Polish economy. Furthermore, each coal-related variable was found to have a nonlinear causal impact on employment. Because of the relatively short length of available time series we additionally applied bootstrap critical values. The empirical results computed by both methods did not exhibit significant differences. These results have important policy implications. In general, our findings support the hypothesis that closing hard coal mines in Poland should have no significant repercussions on economic growth. However, this does not seem to be true for lignite mines.

The demand for coal stems mainly from its application to the generation of electricity and the production of steel. Although Poland had abundant supplies of some natural resources, including coal, the centrally planned system caused a false allocation of those resources and of investment funds to economic sectors. In addition, the cutting off of the most important industrial inputs from the former Soviet Union made a radical restructuring and rebalancing of all sectors, especially hard coal mining, inevitable. In 1990 about 90% of the country's energy production was based on hard coal and lignite. By the end of 1991, however, the Polish coal industry was in serious economic trouble. Fifty six out of sixty seven mines showed losses in 1991 and only seven exhibited profits and were able to cover all their obligations. In 1998 still more than 66% of primary energy supplies in Poland originated from coal. Although Polish mining output has been continuously decreasing in relation to total industrial production in the transition period, it still accounted in 2003 for 4.5% of industrial production (at current prices). Also other indicators show that Poland has remained one of the world's largest coal producers and consumers. Poland's fuel and energy profile was dominated by coal, the only domestic energy source in abundance. The share of the coal sector (hard coal and lignite—often referred to as brown coal) in 2003 amounted to 3.4% of total industry sales but made up 8.1% of all industrial employment in that year. The deep-coal mining industry in Poland has been significantly reduced under market pressure since beginning of the transition process. The main reason was decreasing demand (i.e. an excess supply of coal). The most important customers of the coal industry in Poland are power stations. Their demand for coal between 1990 and 2003 reduced approximately by 36%. In this period labor costs and employment in the sector remained high, despite the sector's bad financial state. The main reason for this situation was the strength of the trade unions in the coal sector. Because of serious problems in the coal industry over next years the program of restructuring this industry (the closure of inefficient mines and workforce reduction) has been continued. In November 2003, the government introduced a second program in order to consolidate and reform Poland's coal sector—the Program of Restructuring the Hard Coal Mining Sector for 2003–2006. The program planned to close more inefficient mines and reduce employment on a voluntary basis. The government provided miners who voluntarily left the coal sector with other private sector employment and support such as early retirement pensions, retraining and social hardship allowances. The World Bank helped Poland in restructuring its mining industry with a loan. The plan conducted by the Polish government in cooperation with the World Bank led to a further deep fall in employment in the coal industry. The output of hard coal has decreased from a pre-transformation level of 193 million tonnes in 1988 to 101 million tonnes in 2004. The privatization of mines was, however, stopped by the Polish government in 2006. The World-Bank-supported restructuring program had been suspended by the Polish government by 2006. The reason was that the coal industry had that year become more profitable. Therefore only two mines had been closed through the project. The Polish government made a decision that any further mine closures would be handled by the mine companies. This was contrary to the former regulation where the Mine Restructuring Company was responsible for making decisions. The rise in demand in the following years protected the Polish coal industry from a sharp decrease in coal production. In 2009 Poland produced 135.14 million tonnes of coal, i.e. 1.65% of the world total. In the same year Polish coal consumption amounted to 53.85 million tonnes oil equivalent, i.e. 1.64% of the world total. Poland is one of the largest consumers of coal in Europe. Coal recently (in 2009) accounted for 89.5% of the country's primary energy production and over 70% of total consumption. The greater part (55.84%) of coal-fueled power generation is based on hard coal and the remainder is from lignite-fired capacity at mine-mouth captive power plants. The commercially workable hard coal reserves are located in the Upper Silesian and the Lublin basins in the east of Poland (Bogdanka mine), with the Upper Silesian coalfield accounting for approximately 93% of the total. Lignite deposits in Poland are exclusively mined by opencast methods. Two of these operations are located in the center of the country and a third one in the south-western region of Poland. In 2009, total lignite production in Poland dropped because of a fall in demand from 56.9 in 2008 to 54.4 million tonnes. Approximately 99.7% of this production was used by mine-mouth power plants. Lignite-fired power stations generated in 2009 33.66% of total power generation in Poland. Lignite mines in Poland are willing to maintain their production capacity of 65–70 million tonnes per year. Moreover, lignite is expected to play an important role in the Polish energy sector until about 2035. The main goals of the energy policy of the Polish government in recent years were the following: to assure the energy security of the country; to assure the growth of competitiveness and energy efficiency of the national economy; to protect the environment against the negative impact of the energy sector. In the framework of the third goal the need for sustainable development, i.e. the achievement of a balance between social, economic, technical and environmental conditions in the process of development, was established as a priority in the national energy policy. Eleven percent of Poland's surface is considered to be severely environmentally endangered (the most polluted region in Poland, designated an area of the ecological disaster is the Upper Silesia and Cracow region). However, approximately 27 percent of Polish land remains in an almost natural state. These circumstances demand a diverse regional and decentralized approach to environmental protection in the context of energy policy in Poland. Moreover, although fossil fuel power plants in Poland (old and using high sulphur brown coal) are a major source of industrial air pollution, coal smoke is also a cause for serious concern. The mentioned general goals of energy policy in Poland are to be achieved by improving the legal and regulatory instruments of a balanced structure of the primary energy supply with a preference for using domestic coal and lignite resources. This usage should fulfill ecological requirements and assure a rational level of energy costs in the national economy through increasing its efficiency, also in the energy sector. Energy policy should combine the interests of energy consumers and suppliers in order to support security and the quality of the energy supply. As we see from this short review the coal sector is still one of Poland's largest industries and employers. Therefore it is fully justified to ask about coal's importance for the economic growth of Poland in the language of causality notion. Also, converse questions concerning the impact of economic growth on the size of coal production may be of interest to the Reader. Many mines are or were subsidized by government. Thus, according to our prediction in times of fast economic growth the mines can receive more money from government as public help and in consequence can produce more coal. From a theoretical point of view also feedback cannot be excluded. Evidence on the direction of causality may have a significant impact on policy. The results of the research presented in this paper should be helpful in judging which of the four hypotheses (Payne, 2009) tested in previous papers holds true in the case of the Polish economy: Growth hypothesis—this implies that causality runs from energy consumption to economic growth. This suggests that energy consumption plays an important role in economic growth. Any reduction (increase) in energy consumption could lead to a fall (rise) in GDP growth. Conservation hypothesis—this is based on unidirectional causality running from economic growth to energy consumption. This indicates that a country is not dependent on energy for growth and development and thus energy conservation policies will have little or no effect on economic growth. Furthermore, a permanent increase in economic growth may result in a permanent rise in energy consumption. Feedback hypothesis—this asserts that there is two-way (bidirectional) causality between energy consumption and economic growth, i.e. energy and economic growth are interdependent and act as complements to each other. Neutrality hypothesis—this would be supported by the absence of a casual relationship between energy consumption and economic growth, which means that neither conservative nor expansive policies in relation to energy consumption have any effect on economic growth. Therefore, it is important to ascertain empirically whether there is a causal link between energy consumption and economic growth. The existence and directions of these causalities have crucial implications for energy policy and have been intensively examined by many authors. Some of the most important studies will be reviewed in the next section.

Coal and lignite are dominating fuels for Polish power generation, which has been expanded on the basis of solid fuels from domestic sources. Coal and lignite's share in the power generating industry is now prevalent. This situation is expected to be maintained in the long-term. More than 50% of the power stations are over 25 years old, while about 25% have been in usage for more than 30 years. The lignite-fired power plants belong to the newest in Poland. They are subject to remanufacturing in order to meet European environmental standards. The originality of this contribution is mainly related to two facts. Firstly, it was performed for one of the Central European emerging economies and therefore it fills a gap in the literature, which in the past mainly concentrated on developed countries. Secondly, to the best knowledge of the authors this is the first paper, which examines the causal links between all variables on the basis of recent and reliable quarterly data. In the case of post-Soviet economies reliable datasets of sufficient size are not easy to obtain, which makes econometric research (especially based on annual data) difficult or even impossible to perform. The first part of our Granger causality analysis was based on the application of linear tests by means of both asymptotic- and bootstrap-based Toda–Yamamoto procedures. We analyzed three cases, each of which involved GDP, employment and one coal-related variable (i.e. hard coal consumption, lignite consumption and total coal consumption). Regardless of the type of critical values used, no statistically significant linear links were found in any direction for any of the three cases. In few cases testing for causality led to relatively small p-values (around 0.15). In the next part of our research cointegration-based causality tests were conducted in two-dimensional framework for GDP and employment. The results of this research (especially for the sequential elimination variant) led to the conclusion that there may indeed exist a short run causality from employment to GDP. Furthermore, in the long run a feedback causal relationship was also reported. The main goal of the last part of our empirical analysis was to examine strictly nonlinear Granger causal links between all the variables, based on residuals from models used in the linear test. All coal-related variables were found to Granger cause employment (for lignite usage even feedback was detected). Moreover, GDP was found to cause hard coal consumption and total coal consumption (in this case feedback was reported). In contrast, the usage of lignite was found to be a causal factor for GDP. Finally, GDP was once again found to cause employment (for one model even feedback was detected). The findings of this contribution imply some policy recommendations. Since GDP directly causes hard coal consumption and not vice versa, the closure of hard coal mines in Poland (some of them do not bring any profit and even have to be subsidized by the central budget) should not have, in general, a significant negative impact on Polish GDP. In other words our major finding supports the conservation hypothesis of hard coal consumption with respect to economic growth in Poland. Evidence supporting the existence of an indirect causal link from hard coal usage to GDP was relatively weak (it was not supported by the results of the estimation of unrestricted VECM) and cannot change the major conclusion of this part of our research. However, this important conclusion should also be examined in future (interdisciplinary) research in relation to both short- and long-term economic growth on a regional scale, focused on an increase in unemployment as well as all other possible social and political implications of closing hard coal mines (including the important contribution of miners, their families and people employed in related services in local populations). The necessity for such investigations also follows from the above-mentioned Granger causality running from all coal-related variables (i.e. coal consumption) to employment. Preliminary comparative analyses of prices have shown that the prices of Polish steam coal in the first six months of 2008, as against the price of ARA (the Amsterdam–Rotterdam–Antwerp) ports were competitive, while in the first six months of 2009 the prices were uncompetitive and this tendency continued in 2010, which tends to support our empirical findings. Therefore, in our opinion the Polish government should continue the policy started in the first half of this decade to provide miners who voluntarily left the coal sector with other private sector employment. The Polish authorities should support miners leaving hard coal sector with early retirement pensions, retraining and social hardship allowances. These recommendations are in line with EU energy policy, which proposes a reduction in hard coal production in member states. Moreover, they are aimed at cushioning the social consequences of restructuring the coal sector (early retirement, retraining, etc.). As already mentioned some interdisciplinary studies should be carried out to test whether government energy policy (including its social aspects) is indeed meeting the expectations of local society. On the other hand, the detection of a direct nonlinear causal link from lignite consumption to GDP means that the consumption of lignite contributes significantly to economic growth in Poland. In other words the use of this fuel is economically reasonable and important (especially in the production of electricity, which plays a crucial role in economic growth). However, the problem of economic rationality, i.e. the issue of the costs and prices of lignite use in Poland with reference to the connection between lignite mining and electric power stations in market conditions, is very complex. Lignite mines cannot choose the recipient of their product. It will be an electric power station which is associated with lignite mines. The exploitation costs of lignite production in Poland are determined mainly by lignite deposits and other geological factors, the electric energy price as well as technological and organizational circumstances. The electric energy price, which has an indirect impact on the lignite price (i.e. a higher electricity price causes a higher lignite price) plays an important role. Thorough analyses show that electricity produced on the basis of lignite is approximately 30% cheaper than electricity generated by a power station fired by hard coal. The key problem related to lignite exploitation is the acidification of the environment. The major pollutants from power stations based on lignite are CO2, SO2, nitric oxides, O3, air particles and sediments. Facing significantly lower CO2 limits than are necessary, power stations that need to increase their CO2 emission permits must buy permits from those who require fewer permits. The transfer of permits is referred to as a trade. This is a result of EU restrictions oriented towards a reduction of CO2 emission just in some European countries, without any real contribution from countries which on the global scale are the main sources of the emission of greenhouse gases. Therefore, this measure cannot significantly contribute to environmental improvement on a global scale. However, this EU restriction substantially diminishes the competitiveness of electricity generation based on coal, especially on lignite. In addition, we should once again stress that mining projects, especially lignite opencast exploitation, are usually not accepted by society. Social acceptance for the development of new lignite deposits and for new lignite-based power plants in Poland is very low, which is caused by common opinion about the enormous negative environmental effects of the extractive industry. The improvement of the power generation process, the application of modern environmental protection methods in lignite power plants, the contribution of lignite plants to regional prosperity and the living standards of residents could somewhat change this negative attitude to lignite mines in Poland, at least to some extent. To summarize, interdisciplinary case studies related to the above-mentioned risk factors associated with the development of lignite production are necessary. A review of preventive technologies and their cost–benefit analyses (including ecological and health aspects) also deserve considerable attention. The findings of this paper obtained for hard coal and lignite seem to be confirmed by results gained after an analysis of the causal relationships between total coal consumption (hard coal and lignite) and GDP. In this case nonlinear feedback was observed, which may be interpreted as an implication of unidirectional links (the dynamic impact of GDP on hard coal usage, and the causal influence of lignite consumption on GDP).