Determinants of greenhouse gas emissions from Swedish private consumption: Time-series and cross-sectional analyses

The relationships between consumption, energy use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from Swedish households are analysed using both cross-sectional multivariate regressions and a decomposition analysis of GHG emissions between 1993 and 2006 into underlying trends. The analyses cover 104 consumption categories and include both direct and indirect energy use. The results from the cross-sectional analysis confirm previous results from other countries showing that total expenditures is by far the most important determinant of households' energy use and GHG emissions with expenditure elasticities of 0.77 and 0.85, respectively. Households living in single-family houses were also found to cause higher total energy demand than households living in apartments. Age also showed a positive relationship with both total energy use and emissions, while the level of education had a low significance. The decomposition analysis showed that improvements in technical energy efficiency over time had twice as large impact on energy use as the change in composition of consumption. When the effect of energy efficiency improvements was deducted from the energy trend, the relationship between total expenditures and energy use was found to be similar to the cross-sectional relationship.