Second Francqui Lecture: Energy and Economic Growth and Development

The video of my second Francqui lecture on energy and economic growth is now on Youtube:

The first part of the presentation comes from my teaching material on the biophysical foundations of economics. There are a couple of slides of energy units and energy flows from the Global Energy Assessment. The slide of the Earth and economic system is from Perman et al.

The next section of the lecture on the "stylized facts" is based on my 2016 paper with Zsuzsanna Csereklyei and Mar Rubio published in the Energy Journal. I updated the data from 2010 to 2018 using the Penn World Table and International Energy Agency data. The third section on the meta-analysis of the energy and economic growth literature is based on my 2014 paper with Stephan Bruns and Christian Gross also published in the Energy Journal. Finally, I talked about my work with Akshay Shanker in our 2018 working paper: "Energy Intensity, Growth and Technical Change". This material was the most technical and "inside baseball" of the lecture (though a lot less technical than the paper). I think I got a bit lost towards the end when I was talking about the effect of the price of energy on energy intensity and other speculations... But the key message is that there is a lot to research still in this area.

Inaugural Francqui Lecture: Economic Growth and the Environment

The video of my inaugural Francqui lecture on economic growth and the environment is now on Youtube:

 

The first part of the presentation comes from my teaching material on the environmental Kuznets curve. The slide of turning points in the literature is based on my 2001 paper with Mick Common in JEEM: "Is there an environmental Kuznets curve for sulfur?". The cross-sectional graphs on sulfur and carbon emissions are from my 2017 paper in the Journal of Bioeconomics: "The environmental Kuznets curve after 25 years". The longitudinal EKC for five countries uses data from the latest release of CEDS. The idea behind "explaining the paradox" – that there is a monotonic frontier that shifts down over time – is, I think, first expressed in the JEEM paper and then developed in my following papers in Ecological Economics (2002), World Development (2004), Journal of Environment and Development (2005), and then more recently in EDE (2017). Reyer Gerlagh created the original growth rates figure for greenhouse gas emissions, which was in the part I wrote of Chapter 5 of the WG3 volume of the 5th IPCC Assessment Report. A paper on carbon and sulfur emissions was eventually published with Reyer and Paul Burke as the EDE (2017) paper. The research on total greenhouse gas emissions was carried out with my masters student Luis Sanchez and published in Ecological Economics in 2016. This was before the first paper in this series – the EDE one – was eventually published because of the long review process that one went through. The research on PM 2.5 was carried out with my masters student Jeremy Van Dijk and published in Climatic Change in 2017.