Asymmetric effect of energy security on economic performance: evidence from panel quantile regression

Energy security is essential for building resilient economies and sustaining economic growth, as it directly influences productivity, competitiveness, and overall economic performance. While existing research has explored the relationship between energy security and economic development, the asymmetric effects of energy security on economic performance remain underexamined. This paper seeks to address that gap. To test the asymmetric effects of energy security, we use various energy security proxies (domestic energy production relative to consumption, energy production per capita, renewable energy share, energy intensity, and energy consumption per capita) and employ a panel dataset of 117 countries from 2000 to 2022, and apply a panel quantile estimation method. The results reveal strong heterogeneity across income levels. Energy production relative to consumption and population, and energy consumption per capita, have stronger positive effects on GDP per capita in lower quantiles, highlighting the importance of energy availability and access in the early stages of development. By contrast, the renewable energy share has a negative effect in poorer economies but turns positive in richer economies, reflecting the high costs of renewable energy adoption for low-income countries and the benefits it generates in advanced economies. Energy intensity consistently has a negative impact, but the magnitude varies nonlinearly across quantiles, underscoring the role of energy efficiency. The results are robust to alternative sample compositions excluding microstates and to an aggregate measure of energy security constructed using principal component analysis. Overall, the findings suggest that energy policy should be tailored to countries’ development levels.