خلاصة:
E nergy consumption has increased significantly in Iran during the recent decades. In this study, an inter-industrial model has been improved to investigate the sources of the changes in the energy consumption of the country. The input-output tables of Iran for the years 1988 and 2001 have been employed as the database of the model. The innovation of this research allows the researchers to study the sources of changes in energy consumption more specifically. It concerns decomposing the effect of changes in economic structure into input substitution, and backward linkage effects. The results show that the level of final demand, input substitution, and backward linkage effects lead to an increase in energy consumption in the country. In contrast, the energy intensity of products, the structural composition of the final demand, and the categorical composition of the final demand have reducing effects on energy consumption.
ملخص الجهاز:
The results show that the level of final demand, input substitution, and backward linkage effects lead to an increase in energy consumption in the country.
This paper employs an input-output Structural Decomposition Analysis (SDA) approach to identify key factors that affected the energy consumption changes in Iran during 1988-2001.
Hence, the changes in energy consumption of the economy are attributed to six sources containing energy intensity, input substitution, backward linkage, structural composition of final demand, categorical composition of final demand, and level of aggregate final demand effects.
In the simplest form of structural decomposition, as implemented in Lin and Polenske (1995), Kagawa and Inamura (2001), Hoekstra and van den Bergh (2003), Alcántara and Duarte (2004), Cellura et al.
For instance, the changes in energy consumption in Mukhopadhyay and Chakraborty (1999) and Weber (2009) were attributed to four sources, namely energy intensity, production structure, and final consumption, where the latter was itself decomposed into structure and the size of final demand components.
As it is shown in Table 1 and Figure 1, the change in the level of aggregate final demand in the economy is the main source of increase in the energy consumption of the country.
On the other hand, the results of the research indicate that the effects of input substitution and backward linkage, the components concerning the production structure of economy, led to an increment in energy use during 1988-2001 in Iran.
Changes in other factors, including structural and categorical composition of final demand and energy intensity of products, resulted in a decline in energy consumption in this period.