Impact of Age Groups of Population on Energy Consumption in OPEC Countries

The domestic researches have less paid attention to the impact of consumer behavior among age groups in the population of a country on energy consumption. The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of behavior of three age groups in OPEC countries on per capita energy consumption over the period 1990-2014. These age groups range from 20 to 34, 35 to 64, and 65 to 79 years old. Estimations of the three experimental models using Panel ARDL method show that increases in the shares of these age groups lead to significant increases in energy consumption, so that the impact of age on energy consumption decreases with an increase in age and a decrease in share of active labor. Meanwhile, the highest and lowest influences are for the age group of 20 to 34 years and the 65 to 79 years, respectively. Also, GDP per capita has positive and significant effect on per capita energy consumption, but the effect of the global crude oil price on the per capita energy consumption is negative in the sample under study. In addition, the coefficients of error correction terms indicate that the deviation from long-term equilibrium for the age group of 20 to 34 years is -0.32. Hence, at the end of the third period any energy consumption disequilibrium returns to long-term equilibrium. The error correction in the second age group takes two periods and the deviation from the equilibrium in the third group disappears in less than a period