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Scientific paper

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Primary Energy Analysis: A New Approach beyond Extant Growth Theories (revised version)

Authors:
Hidekazu Aoki, Nobuo Kawamiya

Entry type:
Scientific paper

Year of publication:
2014

Publishers:
Degrowth Conference Leipzig 2014

Language:
English

Abstract: A best possible indicator to represent the whole economic activity should be not the GDP but "the whole industrial production (WIP)" because the former represents only the added value sector of an economy, while the latter comprises both the GDP and all intermediate throughputs in the economy. The historical change of WIP compared with the primary energy supply (PES) in Japan revealed a close structural correlation between WIP and PES: Japan’s once rapid growth had a remarkable feature that a sharp rise of the PES occurred during 1955-1973 and that of the WIP, during 1965-1985, with a clear time-lag of ten years or so. And the dual stagnation of PES and WIP has deeply rooted in Japan’s economy since the bubble burst in 1990. This serious economic frustration has long been regarded as peculiar to Japan but, since the Lehman shock, such a situation has suddenly become a world standard. We then try to analyze this situation semi-quantitatively in the light of logistic function analysis.

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