HOW URBANIZATION AFFECTS ENERGY-USE IN DEVELOPING-COUNTRIES

This paper identifies mechanisms whereby urbanization affects energy consumption. Industrialization and urbanization accompany each other during economic development, but urbanization exerts a number of independent influences on energy-use. It permits economies of scale in production but requires more transportation. Food must be transported to urbanized populations and relatively smaller agricultural populations must modernize, entailing considerable increases in agricultural energy-use. In cities, a number of production activities which were domestically provided in rural areas, using human or animal energy, shift to sources outside the household, using modern energy sources. The largest single source of change in energy-use is personal transportation. Passenger transport in cities is heavily weighted towards fuel-using modes, particularly as incomes increase. To assess the overall impact, a regression analysis of 59 developing countries for 1980 is conducted. Holding constant per capita income and the extent of industrialization, the elasticity of energy consumption per capita and per dollar of GDP is between 0.35 and 0.48.