IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/pshchp/978-3-031-40139-8_6.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Energy Efficiency, Productivity and the Jevons Paradox

In: Science, Technology and Innovation in the History of Economic Thought

Author

Listed:
  • Estrella Trincado Aznar

    (Complutense University of Madrid)

  • José María Vindel

    (Ministry of Labour and Social Economy)

Abstract

In this chapter, the Jevons paradox is studied in the context of the debate on the limits to Growth. This “Jevons paradox” is part of a more general criticism of William Stanley Jevons to classical economics. For Jevons, when the cost of production declines due to resource efficiency, the marginal utility of commodities that use the given resource declines, increasing directly the consumption of those commodities and indirectly the consumption of other commodities with which they are exchanged. Then, scientific progress and resource efficiency is not a good path to the lesser use of resources. Actually, as coal is a non-renewable energy resource, it may be depleted. Jevons’ line of thought led to new areas in economics that imply that economics cannot be fully split from other sciences. The chapter assesses the current importance of the Jevons paradox in the macroeconomic and the microeconomic level, looking at the relationship between economic growth and energy efficiency. Finally, the chapter comments on the energy policies proposed to avoid the rebound effect, with some concluding remarks on the evolution of the concept.

Suggested Citation

  • Estrella Trincado Aznar & José María Vindel, 2023. "Energy Efficiency, Productivity and the Jevons Paradox," Palgrave Studies in the History of Economic Thought, in: Estrella Trincado Aznar & Fernando López Castellano (ed.), Science, Technology and Innovation in the History of Economic Thought, chapter 0, pages 109-137, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:pshchp:978-3-031-40139-8_6
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-40139-8_6
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:pshchp:978-3-031-40139-8_6. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.