Toward a better understanding of energy consumption—I. The distribution of per capita energy consumption in the world

This paper deals with the inputs that are necessary for investigating future energy demands in various countries.With the view of providing inputs that are indispensable for writing scenarios, we have investigated how energy is linked to the state of the economy and how the life styles of individuals relate to the state of technology achieved, to name two important issues.The information will be presented in three parts. This Part I deals with the distribution of energy consumption in the world. The simple distribution curve of the world's per capita consumption provides considerable insight into the importance of energy for different life styles. In Part II, factor analysis will be used to compare energy consumption with other economic indices and to relate it to the structure of energy consumption. Part III will be devoted to energy analysis, the concept and its applicability. Energy analysis will also be discussed from the points of view of engineering and statistics.The quantitative information presented here provides a crude picture as to how energy is used today, by whom and what for. The figures, which were mainly derived from statistical data, are largely self-explanatory and should be generally useful.