The Relationship Between GDP and Electricity Consumption in Southeast European Countries

Abstract

Energy plays an important role in the economic development. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between GDP per capita and the electricity consumption on 2000–2014 time series for some of the countries of Southeast Europe (B&H, Croatia, Greece, Serbia, Slovenia, Romania and Bulgaria). The annual data for GDP per capita and electricity consumption are obtained from several online available official databases. Comparative analysis showed that in the reference period GDP per capita (19,900 (17,600–21,500) EUR/capita) and electricity consumption (50.51 ± 3.82 TWh) in Greece was significantly higher than the GDP per capita and electricity consumption in all other analyzed countries (p < 0.005). A strong, statistically significant positive correlation between GDP per capita and electricity consumption was found in all analyzed countries except in Serbia, (Rho = - 0.407; p = 0.131 NS). The highest coefficient of determination [ r-square (r2)] having a value of 0.9051 has been identified for Bulgaria, while the lowest coefficient r2 was identified for Serbia (0.238). Bosnia and Herzegovina has a very close relation between GDP and electricity consumption, (Rho = 0.885; p = 0.00001) while the coefficient of determination r2 was 0.8436. In other words, for the reference period 2000–2014, about 84 % changes in electricity consumption in B&H can be described by changes of GDP. The obtained results show a very close relationship between the GDP per capita and electricity consumption for selected countries.