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• Decoupling of GDP from all energy sources under multiple principles are examined. • World economy achieved weak energy decoupling in most years during 2000–2011. • World economy coupled with coal use and tended to couple with cleaner energy use. • None of studied economies achieved long-term GDP-embodied energy decoupling. • Decoupling delusions occurred when only considering direct and total energy use. Decoupling indicators are widely used to understand links between economic growth and energy use. However, traditional decoupling analyses mostly focus on domestic energy consumption (i.e., the production-based principle) and neglect off-site energy use across global supply chains to satisfy an economy's final consumption (i.e., the consumption-based principle). Moreover, analyses for total primary energy conceal an economy's preference for different energy sources. Therefore, this paper evaluates decoupling states of GDP from all types of primary energy use under consumption-based principle, for world economy and eight typical economies during 2000–2011. Regarding total primary energy, world economy witnessed weak decoupling in most years, and most economies studied (e.g., USA, Japan and China) achieved decoupling initially but performed negative decoupling finally. For EU, USA, Japan, Russia and India, production-based decoupling performances were generally better than consumption-based ones. Decoupling phenomena detected under production-based principle even became coupling or negative decoupling under consumption-based principle in some cases. As for each energy source, world economy decoupled from oil use, but still coupled with coal use, and gradually showed a trend to couple with natural gas and renewables use. Different energy sources showed distinct decoupling degrees from GDP, affected by individual embodied energy requirement structure. This paper uncovers potential energy decoupling delusions to deepen the understanding of relationships between energy use and economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper studies the effects of oil price shocks in the last 30years on the Brazilian and American inflation rate and rhythm of economic activity. The Brazilian and the United States economies are interesting polar cases, since they had a completely different path on the oil import dependence rate. While the oil import dependence rate has increase sharply in the United States (US), it has decreased substantially in Brazil. We found that output growth volatility in the United States has been decreasing over time as well as the contribution of oil price shocks to such volatility, despite the increase in oil import dependence. Inflation volatility has also been decreasing but oil price shocks are accounting for a larger fraction of this volatility in the US. In Brazil, such shocks do not seem to have a clear impact on output growth and they account for a very small fraction of the Brazilian inflation and output growth rate volatility. We finally run some counterfactual experiments to analyze how real output growth in the United States would had been if net oil import share in the United States behaved similarly to what was observed in Brazil. We conclude that output level would be roughly the same, however, it would be about 10% less volatile if the US had the actual Brazilian oil import share. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The goal of this paper is to examine whether the volatility of the growth in the US oil stocks has changed overtime, and if it has then whether or not this change is real. We find that the growth in volatility of oil stocks has declined overtime. We conduct a Monte Carlo simulation exercise to investigate whether this decline is real or an artefact of the growth definition. Our findings support the fact that the decline in growth volatility of oil stocks is an artefact of the growth definition. This is because a data generating process having a unit root with drift has a tendency to grow and thereby pulls the variance of growth down with time. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]