Value distribution,dependency,and drivers of the global energy industry
Energy is pivotal for the operation of the global economy.It is thus critical for us to elucidate the characteristics and dynamics of the global energy industry during the process of transformation in the 21st century.Using the input-output data by the United Nations from 1990 to 2022,this study gauges the added value of the energy industry of 184 countries and regions in the world and seeks to show its distribution,asymmetric dependency,and key drivers across different industrial stages.(1)We find the value of the global energy industry grew slowly at first,then rapidly,followed by slowly again,and ended up a recession during the period covered in our analysis.This temporal trend corresponds to the cycle of the global economy for each decade.(2)Energy small countries exhibited growing dependence on energy superpowers,and likewise interdependence among energy superpowers also increased,especially in the stage of prospecting and exploitation.This signifies that our world has gradually become an interconnected community of economic coexistence and co-prosperity.(3)We saw the rise of China,Russia,Saudi Arabia,and other countries as they gradually became the chain leader and hubs of the global energy industrial network.Their rise also has made the boundaries of cooperatives blur and the hierarchy of power iterate.The post Cold-War world is evolving from a unipolar one dominated by the United States into a multipolar one,and the global energy order is experiencing a profound reorganization.(4)Interdependence on the energy industry is a result of differences in attributes among countries(regions),their relative advantages,and their multidimensional proximity.Trade gaps,disparities among coporates,shared languages,colonial histories,and global organizations strengthened their interdependence,whereas geographic distance acted as a significant negative factor.Both economic gaps and institutional environments did not make any significant differences in shaping energy dependence.The role of these factors vary across different industrial stages over time.
geopoliticsvalue distributionasymmetric dependencyinternational energy structuredriversglobal value chain