Repositorio Académico

In the EU context, industrial sectors have significantly reduced their energy consumption in the last decade. Despite significant disparities existing across industry branches, comparative studies focused on the effect of energy use in the production growth of the different industry branches are limited and not related to the EU countries. This study undertakes a production growth approach to analyze the effect of energy use in different industry branches, through the estimation of translog production functions, based on data from 12 EU countries during the 2000–2014 period. In addition, two sub-periods are studied to evaluate if industrial energy efficiency has been improving through time, specifically from 2007. Findings confirm the existence of different behavior patterns with respect to energy use in the considered sectors and from one sub-period to another. As a result, policy measures should be sector-specific, since no general production-energy use patterns can be obtained. © 2018 Elsevier Ltd