The influence of energy prices on cost competitiveness: a multi-sectoral and international approach.

Summary The WIOD (World Input-Output Database) project led by the European Commission since 2009 has been able to take advantage of the development of statistical sources on international trade in recent years to harmonize the input-output tables of many countries at a global level. This database renews interest in input-output analyses inspired by the work of Leontief, adapted to the framework of a world economy. It is now possible to follow the propagation of a shock at the global level. The thesis is in line with this revival by trying to evaluate the inter-sectoral and international chain of events of a shock on energy prices, and its impact on unit production costs. The originality of this paper is that it seeks to go beyond the usual limits of input-output analysis by allowing an endogenous deformation of technical coefficients over time.The thesis seeks to take advantage of the econometric literature on flexible functional forms, applied to the analysis of production, to overcome this main limitation. The interest of the flexible cost functional form of the Generalized Leontief type is more particularly discussed insofar as it covers as a special case the usual input-output model. The thesis proposes to use a nested sectoral modeling and gives an important place to the theory of indices to achieve this in the most coherent way possible. The model thus developed is finally estimated in order to carry out simulation work on the effects of a carbon tax in European countries on the cost competitiveness of the different sectors in these countries. We study the effects of a carbon tax at 20€/tCO2 or 80€/tCO2 first at the European level. The analysis of cost competitiveness reveals that Poland and Spain would be the main losers of this tax while the other European countries manage to preserve their competitiveness vis-à-vis the rest of the world. A similar study on a tax applied unilaterally on France or Germany shows that these countries will be only slightly affected.