CERE Working Papers,
CERE - the Center for Environmental and Resource Economics

Abstract: Energy inefficiency in production implies that the same level of goods and services could be produced using less energy. The potential energy inefficiency of a firm may be linked to long-term structural rigidities in the production process and/or systematic shortcomings in management (persistent inefficiency), or associated with temporary issues like misallocation of resources (transient inefficiency). Eliminating or mitigating different inefficiencies may require different policy measures. Studies measuring industrial energy inefficiency have mostly focused on overall inefficiencies and have paid little attention to distinctions between the types. The aim of this study was to assess whether energy inefficiency is transient and/or persistent in the Swedish manufacturing industry. I used a firm-level panel dataset covering fourteen industrial sectors from 1997–2008 and estimated a stochastic energy demand frontier model. The model included a four-component error term separating persistent and transient inefficiency from unobserved heterogeneity and random noise. I found that both transient and persistent energy inefficiencies exist in most sectors of the Swedish manufacturing industry. Overall, persistent energy inefficiency was larger than transient, but varied considerably in different manufacturing sectors. The results suggest that, generally, energy inefficiencies in the Swedish manufacturing industry were related to structural rigidities connected to technology and/or management practices.

Keywords: Stochastic energy demand frontier model; persistent and transient energy inefficiency; energy inefficiency.

JEL-codes: D22; L60; Q40

27 pages, November 4, 2020

Full text files

papers.cfm?abstract_id=3725037  Full text

Download statistics

• CERE - the Center for Environmental and Resource Economics
• Home page for this series

Questions (including download problems) about the papers in this series should be directed to Mona Bonta Bergman ()
Report other problems with accessing this service to Sune Karlsson ().

This page generated on 2024-02-05 17:13:36.