Aggregate Productivity under an Energy-Based Approach

Obtaining reliable data on capital is a recurring challenge when estimating economy-wide productivity growth, especially for developing countries. In this paper I construct energy-based productivity series which use energy consumption instead of capital when making such estimates. I first show that—for the U.S. and select OECD countries—growth in the energy-based series are strongly correlated with other sources historically. I then estimate energy-based productivity growth for other OECD and non-OECD countries where data on capital and productivity is more limited.