رابطه علی بین مصرف برق و رشد اقتصادی در کشورهای ASEAN

This paper investigates the causal relationship between electricity consumption and economic growth among the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) 4 members, namely Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand, using modern time-series techniques for the period 1971–2002. The results indicate that there is a bi-directional causality between electricity consumption and economic growth in Malaysia and Singapore. This means that an increase in electricity consumption directly affects economic growth and that economic growth also stimulates further electricity consumption in the two countries. However, uni-directional causality runs from economic growth to electricity consumption in Indonesia and Thailand without any feedback effect. Thus, electricity conservation policies can be initiated without deteriorating economic side effects in the two countries.

In the past two decades, numerous studies have been conducted to examine the relationship between electricity consumption and economic growth. The overall findings show that there is a strong relationship between electricity consumption and economic growth. For example, Ferguson et al. (2000) has studied the issue in over 100 countries, and found that as a whole there is a strong correlation between electricity consumption and economic growth. However, the fact that there exists a strong relationship between electricity consumption and economic growth does not necessarily imply a causal relationship. The relationship may very well run from electricity consumption to economic growth, and/or from economic growth to electricity consumption. These causality issues, therefore, suggest the need to carry out further investigations. A major question concerning this issue is which variable should take precedence over the other—is electricity consumption a stimulus for economic growth or does economic growth lead to electricity consumption? Public policy makers in the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries have shown a great deal of interest in the role that electricity consumption plays in economic growth. The electricity infrastructure of the countries is becoming an increasingly important component of the economy. According to the ASEAN Center for Energy, energy consumption in ASEAN would rise to about 583 million tons of oil equivalent (MTOE) in 2020 from 280 MTOE in 2000. Thus, the ASEAN need as much as 461 billion US dollars in investments in the energy sector from 2001 to 2020 to sustain economic growth, and about 323 billion dollars of this, would be needed in the electricity sector. In particular, greater use of information and communications technologies (ICTs) marks a worldwide transition toward a digital society that may profoundly affect electricity consumption.1 A digital society implies growing reliance on networked ICTs, with more and more people using the Internet and such other ICTs as cell phones, digital video recorders, digital music players, personal computers, and so on. In addition, as commonly known, electricity has become the preferred and dominant form of energy over expanding portion of economic life in industrial economies, has been a major source of betterment of the standard of living, and has played a crucial role in the technological and scientific advancement (Rosenberg, 1998). To proactively cope with increasing electricity demand accompanying rapid economic growth, the ASEAN should endeavor to uncover the causal relationship between electricity consumption and economic growth and to make appropriate electricity policy. This task has become one of the most important ones for the ASEAN in the present and in the near future (Yong, 2004; Karki et al., 2005). The purpose of this paper is, therefore, to investigate causality between electricity consumption and economic growth in the ASEAN countries, and to obtain policy implications from the results. To this end, we attempt to provide more careful consideration of the causality issues by applying rigorous techniques of Granger-causality to the ASEAN data. The methods adopted here are in the following fashion. First, stationarity and co-integration are tested; second, error-correction models are estimated if co-integration is detected and the standard Granger-causality method is performed otherwise; finally, the F-test is performed to gauge the joint significance levels of causality between electricity consumption and economic growth. Through the analysis, instead of arbitrarily choosing a lag length, suitable information criteria are employed to select the optimum lag. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Literature review on causality studies of electricity consumption and economic growth is provided in Section 2. An overview of the methodology adopted here is presented in Section 3. Section 4 explains the data employed and reports the empirical findings. Some concluding remarks are made in the final section.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the causal relationship between electricity consumption and economic growth for the ASEAN region, and to obtain policy implications of the results. To this end, causality tests have been performed using modern techniques in the time series literature and adapted in a framework where both traditional and additional channels of causality could be exposed. The data availability and the techniques adopted here made the investigation cover Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand and the period 1971–2002. In summary, time series properties of the data have been analyzed by way of unit root and co-integration tests before applying Granger's causality tests and several models were estimated to test for the direction of Granger-causality. This paper has brought evidence from the ASEAN 4 countries, in the causality between electricity consumption and economic growth as well as the direction of causality. These are interesting features of the paper. The main conclusion that emerges from the exercise is that the causal relationship between electricity consumption and real GDP is not uniform across countries. The results of the study show that there is a bi-directional causality between electricity consumption and economic growth in Malaysia and Singapore, while uni-directional causality runs from economic growth to electricity consumption in Indonesia and Thailand without any feedback effect. Electricity consumption has a favorable impact on economic growth in Malaysia and Singapore, whereas in Indonesia and Thailand it does not affect economic growth. However, significant causal relationship between electricity consumption and economic growth is revealed for all countries. The observed cross-country diversity in the causal pattern is not altogether unexpected. Energy consumption structures and economic policies, which are known to differ across countries, make it natural to expect a certain degree of cross-country variability in the causal nexus between electricity consumption and economic growth. For instance, the absence of causal relationship from electricity consumption to economic growth in Indonesia and Thailand is understandable in view of the fact that a considerable part of electricity in the two countries has been actually consumed for basic human life, with the remainder going for economic activities that can induce an increase in real GDP. Any increase in electricity consumption will not significantly affect real GDP in Indonesia and Thailand. Can the magnitude of electricity consumption per capita or that of real GDP per capita explain the observed differences in the causal nexus between electricity consumption and economic growth? Note that from Fig. 1 and Fig. 2, real GDP per capita and electricity consumption per capita for Indonesia and Thailand are much less than those for Malaysia and Singapore. Interestingly, it appears that the relationship between electricity consumption and economic growth is dependent on the magnitude of electricity consumption and/or that of real GDP. The interpretations and implications of the results can be further discussed in three aspects. In the first place, what is evident from tests for causality running from economic growth to electricity consumption is that the results are uniform. In other words, economic growth stimulates further electricity consumption in all 4 countries. Thus, a growth in real GDP is responsible for a high level of electricity consumption. Economic growth results in a higher proportion of real GDP spent on electricity consumption, and stimulates further electricity consumption. This result can be interpreted as follows. With the advancement of the countries’ economy, there has been a rapid growth in electricity consumption in various sectors. Households, because of their higher disposal income, have come to consume more and more electricity. Economic growth causes expansion in the industrial and commercial sectors where electricity has been used as basic input. Newly constructed large-scale plants and factories have also made electricity consumption to accelerate to keep pace with economic growth. Thus, one could reasonably expect that economic growth enhances electricity consumption in the countries. Second, the study finding of bi-directional Granger-causality or feedback between electricity consumption and economic growth has a number of implications for policy analysts and forecasters in Malaysia and Singapore. A high level of electricity consumption leads to high level of real GDP. This implies that electricity consumption infrastructure shortage may restrain the economic growth in Malaysia and Singapore. Increasing real GDP requires enormous electricity consumption, though there are many other factors contributing to economic growth, and electricity is only one of such factors. In order not to adversely affect economic growth, efforts must be made to encourage government and industry to increase electricity supply investment and to overcome the constraints on electricity consumption. A policy for increasing electricity supply investment is, therefore, likely to enhance economic growth for Malaysia and Singapore. In pursuit of continuing economic growth, they will need to put more efforts into increasing electricity supply investment when implementing national electricity supply infrastructure as a strategy toward advanced development in the long haul. Thus, this study generates confidence in decisions to invest in the electricity supply infrastructure. Furthermore, as implied by Baer et al. (2002), the payoff effect of ICTs on economic growth can be achieved only through a robust national electricity infrastructure that supports ICT adoption and applications. Accordingly to the ASEAN Center for Energy, among the 10 member countries of the ASEAN Indonesia requires the most investment in electricity sector and Thailand is second. Their electricity authorities need to take another electricity supply action in the near future to bridge its future demand–supply gap. The authorities are also planning to initiate a major electricity conservation and efficiency improvement program as a part of the ongoing reform processes because of electricity saving potentials. In this situation, the absence of uni-directional causality running from electricity consumption to economic growth in the two countries have important policy implications for decision-makers as electricity conservation policies through rationalizing the tariff structure, efficiency improvement and demand side management, which aim at curtailment of wastage of electricity and thereby reduce the electricity consumption without affecting the end-use benefits, can be initiated with no damaging impact on economic growth of the two countries. The author thinks of this work as the beginning of a long-term effort to completely disclose causal linkages between electricity consumption and economic growth in the ASEAN countries. Two extensions of the present framework in future study would be fruitful. Most of the existing causality studies of electricity consumption and GDP use time series analysis, which is also adopted in this study. However, the panel analysis has the advantages of larger number observations, higher degree of freedom, and reduction of collinearity among explanatory variables which would improve the efficiency of the Granger-causality test. Thus, a study extending time series analysis to panel analysis would be more interesting. Secondly, this analysis based on bi-variate system can be readily extended to other multi-variate systems, where electricity consumption and real income are exposed to be determined by other economic factors such as price, employment, exports, etc. Such an analysis could reveal the structural channels by which real income and electricity consumption are inherently causal.