Energy Vulnerability Around The World: The Global Energy Vulnerability Index (Gevi)

Vulnerability has garnered an increasing attention from academia, international community and industry. Nonetheless, formal definition, mainstreaming, and measurement of vulnerability are still flawed in the economic literature. Energy vulnerability, intended as the exposure of an energy system to adverse events and change, often overlaps with other energy policy concepts such as resilience, security, poverty, justice, and sustainability. This paper improves understanding of vulnerability in economics, energy, and sustainability studies by: i) constructing a dataset on energy vulnerability made of 180.000 observations; ii) formally defining energy vulnerability, while considering the regulatory framework and development agenda; iii) building a composite indicator on energy vulnerability; iv) analyzing and ranking the energy vulnerability of a vast number of OECD and non-OECD countries; v) testing for robustness checks. The analysis suggests that GDP is not necessarily a leading driver for energy vulnerability, whilst resource embedment is, since fossil and renewable energy producers are less vulnerable. Eventually, the paper validates that green countries are less vulnerable, differently from cold, heavily-industrialized, and highly-consuming countries. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.