A number of countries have decoupled economic growth from energy use, even if we take offshored production into account

At low to middle incomes, energy use is strongly correlated with how much money we have. As people get richer they tend to use more energy. They install lighting in their homes; get a washing machine; air conditioning or heating; maybe even a car.

But many countries have shown that at higher levels of income energy use is not increasing further. A number of rich countries have managed to decouple economic growth from energy use: GDP has increased while energy use has stayed the same, or even declined.

One example of this is Sweden, which is shown in the chart. This chart shows its percentage change in GDP and energy use per capita from 1995. We see that its GDP has increased substantially. While its energy use has barely changed at all. You can see data without per capita adjustments here.

It’s not just Sweden. A number of rich countries have managed to achieve this. The UK, Germany, Denmark and Switzerland are some examples of where energy use has remained flat or even declined. You can see the trends for these countries by using the “Change country” button on the interactive chart.

It would be wrong to assume that rich countries have only achieved this by offshoring manufacturing overseas – which would simply mean that other countries are consuming this energy on their behalf. Consumption-based energy use – which adjusts for the energy used to produce the goods we import and export – has also plateaued or fallen in many countries. We see this clearly in the chart for Sweden.

Since energy use is a key driver of CO₂ emissions it is not therefore not surprising to also see this decoupling in CO₂ emissions. Many countries have managed to grow their economies while reducing emissions at the same time.

Hannah Ritchie (2021) - “A number of countries have decoupled economic growth from energy use, even if we take offshored production into account” Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/energy-gdp-decoupling' [Online Resource]

@article{owid-energy-gdp-decoupling,
    author = {Hannah Ritchie},
    title = {A number of countries have decoupled economic growth from energy use, even if we take offshored production into account},
    journal = {Our World in Data},
    year = {2021},
    note = {https://ourworldindata.org/energy-gdp-decoupling}
}

Reuse this work freely

All visualizations, data, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

The data produced by third parties and made available by Our World in Data is subject to the license terms from the original third-party authors. We will always indicate the original source of the data in our documentation, so you should always check the license of any such third-party data before use and redistribution.

All of our charts can be embedded in any site.