Energy transitions and technology change: “Leapfrogging” reconsidered

T. Robert Fetter

Resource and Energy Economics, 2022, vol. 70, issue C

Abstract: Understanding the relationship of economic growth, energy consumption, and pollution is critical for forecasting energy demand and environmental impacts. Energy technology innovations create opportunities for low- and middle-income countries to “leapfrog” over older technologies that dominated the development paths of today’s industrialized countries. Yet technology change may also increase consumption at earlier development stages, and institutions and policy choices can hinder energy-efficient development. Extending a recent paper by van Benthem (2015), I build a panel dataset over 136 countries and nearly 60 years to show that over this wider and longer panel, the long-run energy intensity of economic growth is substantially lower for today’s developing countries than in developing countries in the past.

Keywords: Energy transitions; Technology change; Energy efficiency; Economic development; Sustainable energy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 O44 Q47 Q54 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0928765522000446
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:resene:v:70:y:2022:i:c:s0928765522000446

DOI: 10.1016/j.reseneeco.2022.101327

Access Statistics for this article

Resource and Energy Economics is currently edited by J. F. Shogren and S. Smulders

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