Energy efficiency and its determinants: an empirical analysis

This paper analyzes and compares trends in energy efficiency, and looks for its main drivers for some of the largest renewable energy producing countries over 2009 and 2013. In a first stage, a DEA methodology was used to estimate the efficiency scores of the sample countries. Then these scores were used as a dependent variable in a truncated regression using a parametric bootstrap to evaluate the impact of environmental variables on energy efficiency. The empirical results reflect that the scores estimated for each country converge, with the average energy efficiency increasing and its standard deviation decreasing for the period considered. In the second stage we verified that the energy efficiency is positively affected by the economic growth and negatively by the consumption of renewable energy and the population density. This study also addresses the implications of these results and proposes some recommendations that could have positive effects on energy efficiency.