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Summary: This paper examines the role of foreign trade in the consumption of energy in Czechoslovakia through a bottom‐up approach in accounting for energy embodied in trade with manufactured goods. It provides a unique analysis of annual changes in energy embodied in trade in a country characterized by changing political regimes. On the whole, Czechoslovakia has been a net exporter of energy throughout the twentieth century with an average 12% of domestic energy consumption embodied in exports. The role of central planning was found to have a significant effect on the absolute levels of energy embodied in trade, which reached its peak in 1972, when Czechoslovakia had net exports of embodied energy of 29 gigajoules per capita, well above those of Sweden in 1970 or China in 2013. Increased product specialization with a shift toward heavy industrial goods also had a clear impact on the composition of energy embodied in exports. Despite this development, the energy intensity curve of Czechoslovakia does not change substantially when adjusted for foreign trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

State-ownership has often been discussed as one of the major causes of poor industrial energy efficiency performance. This paper utilizes long-run historical data on the energy and material use in one specific industrial sector – the iron and steel production – in countries with both central-planning and market-based system, with a particular focus on former Czechoslovakia paralleled with the developments in China. Czechoslovak productive efficiency of the iron and steel sector fluctuated below the energy efficiency frontier. Until the early 1970s, the country’s iron sector was one of the least efficient ones in our sample. It was, however, during the decades of 1970s and 1980s that efficiency measures were adopted and the energy efficiency of the Czechoslovak iron and steel sector increased significantly to, despite of a priori expectations, reach the energy efficiency frontier. Empirical results for other planned economies show similar development of catching-up to the market economies, particularly in the iron production sector during 1980s. A pattern of efficiency convergence was identified. In China, despite its move toward more market oriented economy, the productive efficiency lagged behind as recently as in 2000 (20–35 percent below the efficiency frontier). The relatively late adoption of energy conservation programs and the persistent government control of the sector in certain provinces slowed down the efficiency improvements. In the socialist economies of Eastern Europe, though, central-planners were able to achieve satisfactory productivity increases, primarily driven by efficiency and saving policies and adjustments in existing technology. It is likely, that as was the case of Eastern Europe, the adoption of vigorous energy policies with clearly defined targets accompanied by monitoring and supervision, will have a tremendous impact on the energy intensity as well as the absolute energy use of the sector in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a new concept of comparative carbon advantage as a potential climate mitigation tool. According to the concept, welfare gains in terms of reduced global CO2 emissions can be achieved by exploiting cross-country sectoral differences in carbon intensity and decarbonized electricity system. The paper empirically tests the concept by utilizing annual data of Sweden between 1995 and 2008. Overall, the results show that Sweden contributed nearly 590 million tons of potential CO2 emissions savings through its exports by having an efficient and low-carbon production and electricity system. This total amount of 590 million tons of CO2 emissions relates to the total savings made if the same amount and composition of Swedish exports was produced using the world average technology. Furthermore, the contribution of Sweden's low carbon electricity generation was over 34% of the total savings, of which some 20% were direct exports of electricity and 80% was electricity embodied in exported products. This research provides a critical understanding of the impact of efficient production and low carbon electricity in generating relative comparative carbon advantage—a policy relevant aspect for the increasingly globalized, and carbon-constrained, world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research suggests that there is an inverted U-shape curve for energy intensity in the long-run for Western Europe with a peak in the early 20th century. This paper tests the hypothesis that the increase of German and British energy intensity was an effect from the concentration of heavy industrial production to these countries, although the consumption of a significant share of these goods took place elsewhere. We use an entirely new database that we have constructed (TEG: Trade, Energy, Growth) to test whether these countries exported more energy-demanding goods than they imported, thus providing other countries with means to industrialize and to consume cheap-energy demanding goods. We find that the U-shape curve is greatly diminished but does not disappear. The pronounced inverted U-curve in German energy intensity without trade adjustments is reduced when we account for energy embodied in the traded commodities. For Britain the shape of the curve is also flattened during the second half of the 19th century, before falling from WWI onwards. These consumption-based accounts are strongly influenced by the trade in metal goods and fuels, facilitating industrialization elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]