A NOVEL APPROACH TO CHARACTERIZING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ECONOMIC GROWTH AND ENERGY CONSUMPTION

Abstract

At the macroeconomic level, the consumption of primary energy resources is a deterministic factor of economic development, which justifies the relevance and importance of introducing an appropriate mathematical model. Using the tools of data-driven dynamical systems and Hamiltonian mechanics, we determine the relationship between energy costs and the distance traveled by a particular national economy in the economic space. The basis for the calculations is the time series describing the evolution of a cumulative GDP, recalculated according to the original method from monetary units to linear geometric dimensions, and energy resources consumed over a fixed period of time. The relevance of the mathematic relationships so obtained is verified by comparing the model predictions with the empirical data produced by four national economies, namely those of Canada, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. In all of the four cases the model demonstrated a nearly perfect fit to the actual data. The approach via approximation the evolutions of economic performance and energy consumption by parabolas proposed in the article lies the groundwork for developing a general theory that may be employed to analyze economic performance of a wide spectrum of national economies and world regions.