New academic paper on the rebound effect

It has been a while since EiD had a post on analysing the rebound effect.  Miklós Antala and Jeroen van den Bergh will soon have a paper published in the May issue of the journal, Energy Policy, entitled “Re-spending rebound: A macro-level assessment for OECD countries and emerging economies.”

Abstract

It is well-known that energy conservation can lead to rebound effects that partly offset the original energy savings. One particular rebound mechanism is re-spending of money savings associated with energy savings on energy intensive goods or services. We calculate the average magnitude of this “re-spending rebound” for different fuels and countries, and for both energy and carbon (CO2) emissions. We find that emerging economies, neglected in past studies, typically have larger rebounds than OECD countries. Since such economies play an increasingly important role in the global economy the re-spending rebound is a growing concern. The re-spending effect is generally larger for gasoline than for natural gas and electricity. Paradoxically, stronger financial incentives to conserve energy tend to increase the rebound. This suggests that with climate regulation and peak oil the re-spending rebound may become more important. We discuss the policy implications of our findings.

Information on the article is available here.

The authors:

Jeroen van den Bergh is ICREA Research Professor and deputy director research at the Institute of Environmental Science & Technology of Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He is also professor of Environmental and Resource Economics in the Faculty of Economics & Business Administration and the Institute for Environmental Studies, VU University Amsterdam.

Miklós Antal is a postdoc working on sustainability and macroeconomics. In search of an economic system where growth is not a necessity, he studies strategies that may reduce the strength of business cycles, decouple employment from economic growth, and help people to accept that more is not necessarily better. He looks at the feasibility of different strategies from an economic, energy, and social complexity perspective.  Miklós was a co-author of a paper presented at the 2013 eceee Summer Study.