EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

A measure of a nation's physical energy supply risk

Manuel Frondel and Christoph Schmidt

The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, 2014, vol. 54, issue 2, 208-215

Abstract: Along with the oil price, concerns about the security of energy supply have soared once again in recent years. Yet, some 40 years after the OPEC oil embargo in 1973, there is no widely accepted statistical measure that captures the notion of energy security. Most likely, this deficit is the result of the great variety of resource economic aspects that are of potential relevance. This paper develops a statistical risk indicator that aims at characterizing the physical energy supply vulnerability of nations that are heavily dependent on energy imports. Our risk indicator condenses the empirical information on the imports of the whole range of fossil fuels, originating from a multitude of export countries, as well as data on their indigenous contribution to domestic energy supply, into a single figure. Applying the proposed concept to energy data on Germany and the U.S. (1980–2007), we find that there is a large gap in the supply risks between both countries, with Germany suffering much more from a tight energy supply situation today than the U.S.

Keywords: Herfindahl index; Shannon–Wiener index; Energy supply risk (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C43 Q41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1062976913000768
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:quaeco:v:54:y:2014:i:2:p:208-215

DOI: 10.1016/j.qref.2013.10.003

Access Statistics for this article

The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance is currently edited by R. J. Arnould and J. E. Finnerty

More articles in The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-23
Handle: RePEc:eee:quaeco:v:54:y:2014:i:2:p:208-215