Energy Diversification Trends and Convergence in this Diversification

Energy diversification is an issue linked to the economic development of countries and has different aspects such as energy efficiency, environmental sustainability, energy security, etc. Considering the importance of energy diversification in this regard, this study calculates diversification indicators for 135 countries covering the period 1990-2019. Furthermore, using calculated indexes the study examines convergence in energy diversification for the panel of all countries and their subgroups in terms of income level and energy abundance. According to the calculated normalized Herfindahl Hirschman indices, the average of the energy source concentration degrees of all countries decreased from 0.479 to 0.425 during the research period. Panel data analysis, on the other hand, supported convergence in energy diversification for all country groups, however, pointed to different convergence speeds according to groups. For the panel covering all countries, it was found that a 1% increase (decrease) in the energy concentration level causes the growth rate of this concentration to be 0.00129 lower (higher). As in the panel covering all countries, the convergence speed was found to be low for all subgroups. This result points to the difficulties of changing the energy systems used by current production structures