Energy Metabolism of 28 World Countries: A Multi-scale Integrated Analysis

•The MuSIASEM approach is used to investigate the energy metabolism of 28 countries.•Total energy throughput grew slower than GDP, resulting in an energy efficiency increases.•The per capita energy consumption generally increased.•Most countries increased the exosomatic metabolic rate of paid and household sectors.•All the countries increased the energy throughput and the human time allocated to the service sector.

In this paper the Multi-Scale Integrated Analysis of Social Metabolism (MuSIASEM) is used to investigate the metabolic profile of 28 world countries. The years considered are 1995 and 2007 and the socio-economic and environmental data included in the World Input-Output Database (WIOD) are used to provide consistent comparisons between countries. The analyses are performed by considering the entire society (Level N), the household and the paid sectors (Level N-1) and the different economic sectors (Level N-2). The main results show that, despite the differences existing between countries, the increasing energy throughput and per-capita consumption contributed to change the metabolic profile of the countries considered in this paper.