Analysis of electricity consumption in the tourism sector. A decomposition approach

Index decomposition analysis (IDA) has become a common tool for studying the evolution of energy consumption. In its initial form it comprises three contributions, namely activity, structure and intensity effects. Various sectors of activities were studied in the literature by employing IDA approach and the present work proposes its application to the electricity consumption in the tourism sector. The proposed decomposition analysis is developed on the basis of seven indexes grouped in three macro contributions, namely energy intensity, economic structure and industrial structure. The decomposition is performed in the period 1995–2017 and Italy was used as test case for the methodology. The analysis highlights that, overall, the changes in electricity intensity and in the industrial structure were responsible for an increase of the electricity consumption of 5.581 GWh, whereas the economic structure was responsible for a decrease of 1.337 GWh. Their contemporary effect determined a total variation of electricity consumption between 1995 and 2017 of 4.244 GWh. Results demonstrated that the proposed IDA equation specifically tailored for the tourism sector allows to provide a detailed analytical explanation of the factors affecting electricity consumption in the Italian tourism sector. The same framework can be applied to any other country and source of energy.