摘要：This paper applies time series methodologies to examine the causal relationship among electricity demand, real per capita GDP and total labour force for Italy during 1970-2009. After a brief introduction, a survey of the economic literature on this issue is reported, before discussing the data and introducing the econometric techniques used. Our estimation results indicate that one cointe-grating relationship exists among these variables. This equilibrium relation implies that, in the long-run, GDP and labour force are correlated negatively, as well as GDP and electricity. Moreover, there is a bi-directional Granger causality flow between real per capita GDP and electricity demand; while labour force does not Granger-cause neither real per capita GDP nor electricity demand. This implies that electricity demand and economic growth are jointly determined at the same time for the Italian case. The Forecast Error Variance Decompositions shows that forecast errors in real per capita GDP are mainly due to uncertainty in GDP itself, while forecast errors in labour force are mainly due to labour force itself, although aggregate income and electricity are important too.
