TRANSPORT ENERGY AND EMISSIONS AND THEIR RELATION TO ECONOMIC OUTPUT

The transport system has big influence on national economy as well as on environment and life quality. The modern economy with high level of labour division would not be productive enough without efficient transport systems. However, they require increasing transport capacity and have higher impact on the environment and power supply. It is a proved fact, that countries with more liberal economy are economically stronger (the relation between the index of economic freedom and the gross domestic product). But the question is what the consequences for other human activities are and whether in the transportation we can use the so called Kuznets curve, which predicates that the environmental impacts decrease with the increasing wealth. We particularly examine the relationship between total amount of exhaust emissions from road transport in the Czech Republic and other European countries and their economic wealth expressed as the GDP per capita. This relation is known as the Kuznets environmental curve and it claims that from a certain level of welfare the total human impacts on the environment decrease.