Benchmarking the electricity intensity of human well-being: A dual-frontier analysis of OECD countries

Abstract

This study develops an electricity intensity of human well-being (EHWB) measure for 31 OECD countries over 1980–2021 and examines how economic development, institutional quality, and globalization are associated with the amount of electricity used per unit of health-related well-being. EHWB is defined using electricity consumption per capita relative to life expectancy, infant survival, and under-five survival; lower values therefore indicate greater electricity-to-well-being efficiency. The empirical design combines, as separate and complementary approaches, non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis with a slack-based measure (DEA-SBM), Malmquist productivity decomposition, and parametric Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA). The revised DEA reporting reconciles the original reciprocal distance scale with the conventional 0–1 technical-efficiency scale. The corrected median DEA-SBM efficiency is 0.826, with a range of approximately 0.734–0.991. Malmquist results show average productivity below unity (0.961), driven mainly by technical change (0.965), while efficiency change remains close to unity (1.000). In the SFA models, GDP per capita is positively associated with EHWB, implying higher electricity intensity rather than improved efficiency, whereas globalization is negatively associated with EHWB and therefore corresponds to better electricity-to-well-being efficiency. The estimated gamma values (0.188–0.390) indicate that random noise accounts for most residual variation, so SFA evidence is interpreted cautiously. Overall, the findings show that high income alone does not guarantee resource-efficient well-being and that electricity-health sustainability requires explicit attention to the intensity with which electricity is converted into human outcomes.