INCOME ELASTICITY OF ELECTRIC ENERGY CONSUMPTION FOR DIFFERENT ECONOMIC SECTORS IN COUNTRIES OF THE WORLD

The causal relationship between energy demand and GDP has been the subject of intense research over the past three decades. The present work seeks to analyze the energy consumption evolution of different countries of the world and the relation of the same with the level of economic development, represented by income. For this purpose, an annual database containing gross domestic product and electricity consumption of 143 countries in the period between 1990 and 2014 was prepared. Thus, linear regression models and autoregressive vector models were used to explain the electricity consumption of countries and groups of countries. The results indicated that there is no standard elasticity behavior for most countries with similar levels of economic development. Despite this, a good performance was observed in the simple linear regression for aggregate data in groups of countries, which indicates the possibility of performing a reliable aggregate planning. Keywords: Electricity Demand, Energy Consumption, Income, GDP, Elasticity.