The Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate and Neoclassical Growth
Harty D. Saunders
The Energy Journal, 1992, vol. Volume 13, issue Number 4, 131-148
Abstract:
In a disturbing assault on intuition and conventional wisdom, Khazzoom and Brookes have asserted that energy efficiency improvements might increase, rather than decrease energy consumption. If true, policies aimed at encouraging conservation could worsen rather than ameliorate global warming and would accelerate the need for offshore drilling rather than provide a substitute for it. More generally, this result would pit conservation against environmental goals, in direct contradiction to many countries' energy plans (which see conservation as an environmental solution). Yet neoclassical growth theory confirms this possibility given certain fairly reasonable conditions-conditions that recent work by Hogan and Jorgenson indicates may hold in the U.S. economy. By no means proving the postulate, this analysis appears to make it much more difficult to dismiss. In fact, the effect can be more dramatic than even Khazzoom and Brookes may appreciate. Energy efficiency gains can increase energy use even more directly by increasing the economic growth rate, not only by decreasing the effective cost of energy. Efficiency gains for other factors (capital and labor) can also increase energy use.
JEL-codes: F0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1992
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (222)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.iaee.org/en/publications/ejarticle.aspx?id=1091 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to IAEE members and subscribers.
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aen:journl:1992v13-04-a07
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.iaee.org/en/publications/ejsearch.aspx
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in The Energy Journal from International Association for Energy Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by David Williams (iaee@iaee.org).