Estimation and Comparison of Energy Efficiency in Iran's Economic Sectors

Energy is one of the main inputs of production process. The scarcity of this valuable input has increased the importance of attention to its efficiency and higher energy efficiency leads to higher economic growth rates. The goal of this research is to estimate energy efficiency in quadruple sectors (agriculture, industry, transportation and services) of Iran’s economy, separately with the aim of increasing precision of calculations and improving quality of results. The efficiency of energy consumption in these four sectors is estimated with the use of a translog stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) and data for 1373-1391, based on theoretical and empirical grounds. Findings indicate that not only energy efficiency of these sectors were declined during the period considered, but the average energy efficiency of all sectors had also a declining trend. The technical efficiency in all sectors were increasing, of course slowly, in contrast to the trend of energy efficiency. The services sector has the lowest energy efficiency.