The natural sciences have established a general scaling law that relates metabolism and body size of animals. Recently this association - known as Kleiber's law - has received deep theoretical foundation by network theory and has been fruitfully applied to explain various biological phenomena, in particular ontogenetic growth. Here we derive a similar power law for economic metabolism (energy consumption per capita) and economic size (capital per capita). Invoking the power law we provide a metabolic-energetic founded law of motion for capital per capita. Using data for the U.S. states we test the resulting structural model and find evidence in favor of a scaling parameter, between energy and capital per capita, of about 2/3.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: