page_title: Energy economics
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Energy economics / History
caption_attribution_description: English: World Energy prices, 1991-2010. 2000=100. Source: World Trade Monitor, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis[1] Français&#160;: Prix mondiaux de l'énergie, 1991-2010. 2000=100. Source: World Trade Monitor, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis[2]
context_page_description: Energy economics is a broad scientific subject area which includes topics related to supply and use of energy in societies. Due to diversity of issues and methods applied and shared with a number of academic disciplines, energy economics does not present itself as a self-contained academic discipline, but it is an applied subdiscipline of economics. From the list of main topics of economics, some relate strongly to energy economics:
  Computable general equilibrium
  Econometrics
  Environmental economics
  Finance
  Industrial organization
  Input–output model
  Microeconomics
  Macroeconomics
  Operations research
  Resource economics
  Energy economics also draws heavily on results of energy engineering, geology, political sciences, ecology etc. Recent focus of energy economics includes the following issues:
  Climate change and climate policy
  Demand response
  Elasticity of supply and demand in energy market
  Energy and economic growth
  Energy derivatives
  Energy elasticity
  Energy forecasting
  Energy markets and electricity markets - liberalisation, regulation
  Economics of energy infrastructure
  Energy policy
  Environmental policy
  Risk analysis and security of supply
  Sustainability
context_section_description: Energy related issues have been actively present in economic literature since the 1973 oil crisis, but have their roots much further back in the history. As early as 1865, W.S. Jevons expressed his concern about the eventual depletion of coal resources in his book The Coal Question. One of the best known early attempts to work on the economics of exhaustible resources (incl. fossil fuel) was made by H. Hotelling, who derived a price path for non-renewable resources, known as Hotelling's rule.
caption: World prices for energy, 1991–2010. 2000=100.
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