Towards international E-stat for monitoring the socio-economic activities across the globe

TL;DR

This paper explores the relationship between electric power consumption and GDP across various regions, highlighting data inconsistencies and the need for standardized international socio-economic data collection.

Contribution

It analyzes global and regional electric power and GDP data, revealing the necessity for standardized data collection and management for socio-economic monitoring.

Findings

Power-law relationship between power consumption and GDP

Data discrepancies among international organizations

Need for standardized socio-economic data systems

Abstract

We investigate relationship between annual electric power consumption per capita and gross domestic production (GDP) per capita for 131 countries. We found that the relationship can be fitted with a power-law function. We examine the relationship for 47 prefectures in Japan. Furthermore, we investigate values of annual electric power production reported by four international organizations. We collected the data from U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), Statistics by International Energy Agency (IEA), OECD Factbook (Economic, Environmental and Social Statistics), and United Nations (UN) Energy Statistics Yearbook. We found that the data structure, values, and unit depend on the organizations. This implies that it is further necessary to establish data standards and an organization to collect, store, and distribute the data on socio-economic systems.