Dóra Fazekas Carbon Market Implications for new EU - UniCredit ...

The CEEs differ significantly with regard to size, state of reforms, economies and environmental
challenges. However, they share several similarities due to their common post-socialist history.
Ürge-Vorsatz presents in several of her papers (Ürge-Vorsatz, Miladinova and Paizs, 2006; Ürge-
Vorsatz, Paizs and Pesic, 2002 and 2003) the special situation of the region. They present that new
Member States have finished their economic transition with the EU accession. They present the
following negative and positive legacies of the centrally planned economies.
• Negative legacies:
- Efficiency was not rewarded
- Production processes were inefficient
- Consumption was decoupled from production
- The market lacked a mechanism for signaling resource scarcity
- Resource pricing was improper
- The economy was not penalizing inefficiency
- The scale of economies was oversized
- The heavy industry’s share was large
- Lack of information and detailed data about real energy consumption
- Lack of awareness of energy wasting practices and how to improve efficiency
- Corruption was widespread
• Positive legacies
- High share of organized modes of transport,
- High share of district heating among heating modes
- Utilization of the “waste” heat source of industrial units or from other cogeneration sources
Ürge-Vorsatz looks at Eastern MSs not from the economic point of view but rather with a focus on
energy, energy policy, and energy efficiency. She describes in several of her papers (Ürge-Vorsatz
et al., 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2006) that beyond diversification, most new MSs identify the increase
of energy efficiency and renewable energy sources as a national energy policy priority. She points
to a very interesting problem that these countries adopted policies designed based on Western
experiences and that the economic transition process relied largely on the transfer of Western
experiences. She warns that this “copy and paste” policy may not work for every MS with different
circumstances, etc. Ürge-Vorsatz (2004) reveals in her presentation at the Öko-Institute in Berlin
that although energy efficiency may be lower in new MSs due to their lower level of environmental
awareness, there is great potential to improve this as their awareness reaches old MSs’ levels. She
describes the CEE countries as a region where legacies of the centrally planned economy are still
present, energy intensity is high, and there are “low-hanging fruit” projects, which have
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