Energy Scarcity and Economic Growth Reconsidered

This analysis is concerned with the effect of energy scarcity on economic growth in the United States. After defining the notion of scarcity and introducing two measures of scarcity, namely unit costs and relative energy price, changes in the trend in resource scarcity are investigated for natural gas, bituminous coal, anthracite coal, and crude oil over the most recent three decades. Each of the energy resources became significantly more scarce during the decade of the 1970s in the Malthusian stock scarcity and Malthusian flow scarcity sense. Unit costs exhibit a similar change for natural gas and crude oil but not for bituminous coal and anthracite coal. The situation reversed itself during the 1980s. Natural gas, bituminous coal, anthracite coal, and crude oil all became significantly less scarce during the 1980s than the 1970s. That is, the increase in scarcity as measured by relative energy prices observed during the 1970s was not reversed completely during the 1980s for natural gas and crude oil. Un...

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