Energy transitions and technology change: “Leapfrogging” reconsidered

Understanding the relationship of economic growth, energy consumption, and pollution is critical for forecasting energy demand and environmental impacts. Energy technology innovations create opportunities for low- and middle-income countries to “leapfrog” over older technologies that dominated the development paths of today’s industrialized countries. Yet technology change may also increase consumption at earlier development stages, and institutions and policy choices can hinder energy-efficient development. Extending a recent paper by van Benthem (2015), I build a panel dataset over 136 countries and nearly 60 years to show that over this wider and longer panel, the long-run energy intensity of economic growth is substantially lower for today’s developing countries than in developing countries in the past.