Economic growth, energy intensity and the energy mix

Antonia Díaz, Gustavo Marrero, Luis Puch and Jesús Rodríguez-López ()

Energy Economics, 2019, vol. 81, issue C, 1056-1077

Abstract: This paper explores how changes in energy intensity and the switch to renewables can boost economic growth. To do so, we implement a dynamic panel data approach on a sample of 134 countries over the period 1960 to 2010. We incorporate a set of control variables, related to human and physical capital, socio-economic conditions, policies and institutions, which have been widely used in the literature on economic growth. Given the current state of technology, improving energy intensity is growth enhancing at the worldwide level. Moreover, conditional to energy intensity, moving from fossil fuels to frontier renewables (wind, solar, wave or geothermic) is also positively correlated with growth. Our results are robust to the specification of the dynamic panel with respect to alternative approaches (pooled OLS, within group or system GMM), and to alternative specifications (accounting for heterogeneity across countries, a set of institutional factors, and other technical aspects).

Keywords: Growth; Energy intensity; Renewables; Dynamic panel data models (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 O5 Q2 Q43 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (37)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140988319301768
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Economic Growth, Energy Intensity and the Energy Mix (2019)
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:eee:eneeco:v:81:y:2019:i:c:p:1056-1077

DOI: 10.1016/j.eneco.2019.05.022

Access Statistics for this article

Energy Economics is currently edited by R. S. J. Tol, Beng Ang, Lance Bachmeier, Perry Sadorsky, Ugur Soytas and J. P. Weyant

More articles in Energy Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().