Energy as a Factor of Production: Historical Roots in the American Institutionalist Context
Energy Economics, volume 86, 2020[10.1016/j.eneco.2020.104706]
Posted: 22 May 2020 Last revised: 29 Jul 2025
Date Written: February 1, 2020
Abstract
The relationship between energy and economic output is today discussed through the decoupling issue. A pioneering historical attempt to measure this relationship can be found in contributions by F. G. Tryon et al. at the Brookings Institution in the 1920s–1930s, in the American institutionalist context. This episode has scarcely been noticed in the literature. On the basis of textual analysis, archival material and econometrics, the purpose of this article is to provide a historical account of this corpus (context, originality), to assess the relevance of its statistical results, and to highlight the salient issues of the time that could feed into contemporary research. In particular, the articulation between empirical observations (inter-index correlation), theoretical implications (considering energy as a factor of production) and energy policy (global strategy rather than sectoral measures) is an old question deserving attention.
Keywords: Decoupling Energy intensity, Tryon, Brookings Institution, Natural resources, Institutionalism, History of economic thought
JEL Classification: C1, B2, Q3, Q4
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation