Energy as a Factor of Production: Historical Roots in the American Institutionalist Context

Antoine Missemer and Franck Nadaud
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Franck Nadaud: CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, CIRED - Centre International de Recherche sur l'Environnement et le Développement - Cirad - Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - AgroParisTech - ENPC - École nationale des ponts et chaussées - Université Paris-Saclay - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

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Abstract: The relationship between energy and economic output is today discussed through the decoupling issue. A pioneering historical attempt to measure this relationship can be found in contributions by F. G. Tryon et al. at the Brookings Institution in the 1920s–1930s, in the American institutionalist context. This episode has scarcely been noticed in the literature. On the basis of textual analysis, archival material and econometrics, the purpose of this article is to provide a historical account of this corpus (context, originality), to assess the relevance of its statistical results, and to highlight the salient issues of the time that could feed into contemporary research. In particular, the articulation between empirical observations (inter-index correlation), theoretical implications (considering energy as a factor of production) and energy policy (global strategy rather than sectoral measures) is an old question deserving attention.

Keywords: Institutionalism; History of economic thought; Natural resources; Brookings Institution; Decoupling; Energy intensity; Tryon (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-02467734v1
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published in Energy Economics, 2020, 86, pp.104706. ⟨10.1016/j.eneco.2020.104706⟩

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Journal Article: Energy as a factor of production: Historical roots in the American institutionalist context (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-02467734

DOI: 10.1016/j.eneco.2020.104706

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