رشد اقتصادی و مصرف برق در جمهوری های شوروی سابق

This study estimates the causal relationship between electricity consumption and economic growth with annual data for the Commonwealth Independent States countries in three groups of income levels. Empirical results reveal that electricity consumption and GDP are cointegrated for all these countries. Furthermore, there is a unidirectional causality from electricity consumption to GDP for all groups in the long run. Effect of electricity consumption on the GDP is negative for the second group of countries which supports the energy conservation policies, whereas it is positive for the first and third group of countries which supports the growth hypothesis.

All of the former Soviet Republics except the Baltic countries formed Commonwealth Independent States (CIS) after the breakup process of the Soviet Union. Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, the Republic of Belarus, the Russian Federation, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan are the members of CIS. Some of the members of the CIS have also established the Eurasian Economic Community to create a more efficient and compatible common market. Some of these countries play major roles in the world energy market as producers of oil and natural gas as well as being energy distribution centers. Nevertheless, energy intensities of these countries are also very high compared to other transition countries in the world. Cornillie and Fankhauser (2004) indicated that energy intensity of most of the CIS countries has increased while some of them were stable in the transition process. In those countries, new and efficient capital inflows to the industrial sectors could not be provided due to delayed privatizations. Extensive use of energy without payment through subsidies and nonpayment of energy bills also contributed to the intensity problem. Thus, structural change did not provide much improvement in energy intensity. Apergis and Payne (2009) analyzed the relationship of energy and economic development in these countries. This paper investigates the relationship between economic growth and one of the subcomponents of energy; electricity. The aim of this study is to estimate the relationship between electricity consumption and economic growth, by the Panel Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) method and Pedroni (1999) cointegration analysis in CIS countries. This study can be defined as a complementary to the previous empirical papers. However, it differs from the existing literature for some aspects. First, as being distinguished from the previous works, it employs not only the Pedroni cointegration and Granger causality methods but also the ARDL method in order to clarify the direction of relationship with elasticities of electricity intensities. Second, it is the first study in the literature that analyzes the relationship between electricity consumption and growth for the CIS countries. Another contribution of the paper is the classification of countries according to the income levels to satisfy more homogeneity in the panel. In the next section of the study, panel studies about energy consumption and growth in the literature will be presented briefly. Econometric theory and methodology are identified in the third section. The fourth section consists of the empirical results while the last section includes conclusions and policy implications.

In this study, we investigated the cointegration and causality relationship of the electricity consumption and economic growth in CIS countries by the ARDL method and Pedroni (1999) cointegration analysis. Since the data reveals great variation across countries in terms of the level of economic development in our sample, we divided them into three subcategories that provide more homogeneity within each group and enable us to see whether differences of income levels in groups result in differences in cointegration and causality relationships in terms of electricity use. The results of both the Pedroni (1999) cointegration tests and the Pesaran et al., 2001a and Pesaran et al., 2001b bound test reveal that electricity consumption and GDP are cointegrated for all groups of countries. Furthermore, there is a bidirectional causality both from electricity consumption to GDP and from GDP to electricity consumption for all groups in the long run according to causality tests. FMOLS and ARDL estimations show that the effect of electricity consumption on GDP is negative for the second group of countries, whereas it is positive for the first groups of countries, which supports the growth hypothesis for this group of countries. Exploring the relationship between electricity consumption and economic growth is very important for policymakers in order to be able to formulate and implement appropriate energy policies. Results of this study indicate that electricity consumption leads to economic growth for the first group of countries so policymakers should consider improving the energy infrastructure and increasing the energy supply to achieve higher economic growth when designing energy policies, whereas energy conservation policies can be implemented in the second group of countries without any negative effect on economic growth.