An international literature survey on energy-economic growth nexus: Evidence from country-specific studies

In this paper, an extensive review of the rapidly growing in the literature on the nexus between economic growth and four types of energy consumption : total energy consumption, electricity consumption, nuclear consumption, and renewable consumption. The various hypotheses associated with the causal interaction between these variables along with a survey of the empirical literature are also discussed. The survey focuses on country coverage, periods, modeling techniques, and empirical conclusions. A general observation from these studies that results are found to be sensitive to methodology and type of energy considered. The empirical results for the specific countries surveyed show that (i) for energy consumption-growth nexus : 29% supported the growth hypothesis, 27% the feedback hypothesis, 23% the conservation hypothesis, and 21% the neutrality hypothesis ; (ii) for the electricity consumption-growth nexus : 40% supported the growth hypothesis, 33% the feedback hypothesis, and 27% conservation hypothesis ; (iii) for the nuclear consumption-growth nexus : 60% supported the neutrality hypothesis, and 40% the growth hypothesis ; and (iv) for the renewable consumption-growth nexus: 40% supported the neutrality hypothesis, 40% the conservation hypothesis, and 20% the growth hypothesis. These mixed results may be attributed to the different used data, selected variables, and econometric approaches undertaken.