Paloma Taltavull
Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Alicante
The article seems to be a mixture of concepts to build a publication, rather than a paper with concrete findings.
The title indicates that the objective is to assess the effect of the energy crisis on household consumption. According to the abstract, it does this for 201 expenditure groups in 116 countries. It then says that it decomposes the indirect impacts of rising energy prices on 33 household expenses, but this is introduced after several descriptive paragraphs that have another objective and it does not say how or in what context it does so. In this section, in which the authors are expected to describe how and where price increases affect consumption, there are descriptions and graphs that have no source and are assumed to be the authors' product, but are unsubstantiated.
The paper then jumps to energy poverty. There are insufficient references to existing studies on energy poverty, which are many. It does not calculate how much energy poverty there is, nor does it provide any method of estimation.
The article then moves on to conclusions without developing an analysis. The paper claims to analyse the effect of an increase in energy prices on household consumption, and these are not represented individually (let alone by type of expenditure) in the Input-Output Tables (IOTs). As far as I know, IOTs are used to assess intra-industry relationships in an economy and estimate the shock that any change in final demand produces on the equilibrium within the economy itself, i.e. not what this study claims to do.
In my view, the analysis is inconsistent with the methodology. By definition, IOTs refer to one year, but the authors take daily data from January 2021 to September 2022; moreover, differentiating prices by energy products, but taking consumption data for 2019, tables for 2017, and the 2011 expenditure structure.
The authors say they use tables published by the Global Trade Analysis Project, GTAP11, which is a database prepared to estimate the effects of international trade. As this article explains, they modify the IOT coefficients, but they do not say for which sector.
There is no indication of which consumer groups, which countries and which expenditure groups they assess. The source information is a key element that allows us to believe that the analysis offered in the article is real, the data true and not created for the purpose of finding evidence, but it is not described here.
Finally, the conclusions do not say anything new, do not refer to the results of the exercise and therefore do not summarise what they demonstrate or find. They do not refer to the effects obtained from their change in IOTs, for example.