The Assessment of the Impact of the Economy's Development on Air Pollution

The economic growth has a negative impact on the environment, that is why the development of models, which would reveal the influence of different factors on the change of the environment, is necessary. In order to study environmental and economic processes, a new approach was proposed, and special models, which allow assessing the impact of the investment policy and environmental activities, were created. It gives an opportunity to link the change of the environment with approved management decisions. The purpose of the article is to identify reasons that cause transformations of the interconnection between economic and environmental indicators, to study the impact of the change of environmental legislation and other external shocks on environmental and economic processes in the Russian Federation and the European Union on the example of air environment. The relevance and significance of this work is determined by changes of environmental legislation in the Russian Federation, which is currently based on the best available technologies (BAT), and the need to build models that would allow predicting the development of environmental and economic processes in changing interconnections of indicators within the emerging practice of applying new legislation. The novelty of the research is the development of models, which allow analyzing the impact of external shocks on environmental and economic processes, on the basis of the proposed approach. Empirical analysis of data was carried out, and models of environmental and economic processes were constructed. It turned out that the change of EU legislation did not lead to a sharp transformation of existing interconnections between economic and environmental indicators, which were associated with economic crises. Crises may contribute to the emergence of a new trend or just bring the system out of balance for a few years, but later its development will again be described by equations similar to pre-crisis ones. The study also allowed us to explain the improvement of environmental indicators with the growth of Russian and EU economies. Its results may be used in the development of strategic documents for the development of regions and countries. Further studies are related to the assessment of various scenarios for the development of regions of the European North of the Russian Federation.