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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]

In a world where climate goals are global but action remains firmly in the hands of states, reliable methods are needed to ensure that emissions reductions on a national level are not offset by carbon leakage. Appropriate indicators are needed to help policy makers set accurate targets for the carbon balance of their foreign trade and monitor the development of trade in a meaningful way. This paper proposes a new displacement indicator – the technology adjusted balance of emissions embodied in trade – that improves on existing ideas by separating out the effects of scale and composition of trade from the effects of different technologies and energy systems. The new indicator is calculated for Swedish and UK trade from 1995 to 2009, a period when both countries have reported decreasing territorial emissions together with sustained economic growth. One key finding is that, for both countries, outsourcing of emissions is less serious than what conventional analysis of emissions embodied in trade suggests. For Sweden, the technology adjusted balance of emissions embodied in trade is positive throughout the studied period, implying that its exports reduce emissions abroad more than what is generated by its imports. However, we also find that both countries have changed the composition of their imports and exports during this period: imports have become more carbon intensive and, exports less so, compared to the world economy at large. [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]