Slides for Hub Workshop

Here are the slides for my presentation at the Environmental Economics Research Hub 2010 workshop in Adelaide on Tuesday. They have a lot of overlap with my presentation to the China forum we just had at ANU, but there are a couple of new things. There's a slide of global energy intensity. There's also a slide of the most important effects on energy intensity. The yellow highlighted boxes are the effects that are largest and significant. These are "important effects". The most important that we are clear about their impact are probably total factor productivity and the exchange rate. Countries with higher TFP, ceteris paribus, are more energy efficient. This makes sense. Countries with more undervalued exchange rates by the PPP criterion are also more energy efficient. This is presumably because oil (and other energy perhaps) is more expensive in these countries, certainly relative to the cost of labor, and therefore, they use technologies that require less energy. Anyway, that's why I included the variable in the model. As a result some poor countries like India are quite energy efficient as are many wealthy countries though they are probably using different technologies to achieve that goal. And, yes, there may be to some degree an inverted U shape relationship between underlying energy efficiency and income per capita.

Finally, there is also a slide at the end with a global decomposition of energy use and carbon emissions. You need to multiply the factors together to get the total change. I'll only use this slide if someone asks about this.

My presentation slides nowadays are very minimal on wording as I think this gives a better presentation than people reading my points off of the slides while I talk. But they are a lot less useful as a document if you don't see the presentation. Maybe we need to produce two sets of slides in future - one for the presentation and one for people who missed it :)