The Energy Representation of World GDP

Boris M. Dolgonosov ()

Biophysical Economics and Resource Quality, 2020, vol. 5, issue 3, 1-5

Abstract: Abstract The GDP–energy relationship is considered on a global scale. We propose a model which represents world gross product as a power-law function GDP = $$g{\left(EU\right)}^{\gamma }$$ g E U γ of current energy consumption $$E$$ E and total energy $$U$$ U consumed over all previous years and materialized in the form of production infrastructure. This energy-based production function has two parameters $$g$$ g and $$\gamma$$ γ that retain their values throughout the years under study (1965–2018), and hence they can be regarded as fundamental characteristics of the world economy within the energy paradigm that considers labor and capital as energy entities. The model describes empirical data with high accuracy (error 1.2%), despite the fact that energy consumption and GDP increase greatly over the period under study. To provide a robustness check, the production function was fitted to the data for a shortened interval of 1965–2000 with a further projection until 2018, which showed a small error of 1.8% in the target interval of 2001–2018. An additional verification of the model, based on the power-law dependencies of GDP, $$E$$ E and $$U$$ U on world population, confirmed the functional form of the production function and led to almost the same parameter values as those obtained independently.

Keywords: World GDP; Production function; Energy consumption; Materialized energy; Population dependencies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s41247-020-00078-z Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:bioerq:v:5:y:2020:i:3:d:10.1007_s41247-020-00078-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/41247

DOI: 10.1007/s41247-020-00078-z

Access Statistics for this article

Biophysical Economics and Resource Quality is currently edited by C.A.S. Hall and U. Bardi

More articles in Biophysical Economics and Resource Quality from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().