Friday, August 19, 2011

Playing with economic numbers

Today's big project was looking at data for energy inputs by industry versus GDP by industry. It took me a while to find appropriate data and start putting it together, and it's still frustrating, because it's almost, but not quite as detailed as I want. For instance, "Mining" breaks down to "oil and gas" and "Mining other than oil and gas", but what I really want is oil, gas, and coal. I haven't found a data source that lets me pull coal out of the "other" category.

Oh well. I did come up with the amount of a money spent on energy inputs per dollar of value created, by industry. The top three industries in terms of amount spent on energy inputs per dollar created are all transportation: water transportation, air transportation, and truck transportation. I guess that makes sense; energy is the main input for those industries. After that it's a grab bag: metals manufacturing, paper products, farms, "non-metallic mineral products" (basically cement is what drives that), wood products, "government enterprises" (??), food/beverage/tobacco, and a few others.

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