Determinants of energy intensity for European Union countries and Turkey: Evidence from geographically weighted regression analysis

This study analyzes the factors affecting the energy intensity of the European Union (EU) countries and Turkey in 2022. The focus of the study is to consider energy intensity as a dependent variable and to investigate the relationships between energy intensity and health expenditures, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita and trade variables. For this purpose, the effect of the environmental factor spatially and globally was examined using the Least Squares (LS) estimation method and the Geographically Weighted Regression (CAR) method. When the obtained results were examined, it was seen that the R^2 value of the model estimated with the LLS was 0.176 and the R^2 value of the model estimated with the CAR method was 0.743. The obtained results show that the CAR method better emphasizes the spatial effects of the data. In addition to the R^2 values, the CAR and LLS models were compared by taking into account information criteria such as BIC, AIC, AICc. According to the analysis results, it was reported that the CAR model explained the relationship between the variables better and was more effective than the LLS model estimation technique. Key words: Energy Intensity, Geographically Weighted Regression, European Union, Türkiye