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Energy efficiency is key to strategies seeking to guarantee secure, sustainable, and inclusive economic growth, boost competitiveness and welfare, and to reduce the environmental footprint of the energy system.
Countries have pledged to double the global rate of improvement in energy efficiency by 2030, as articulated by Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target 7.3, by making energy efficiency measures a policy and investment priority. The energy intensity level of primary energy, defined as the ratio of energy supply to PPP-based GDP, is the official SDG indicator used for measuring progress towards this target and is an indication of how much energy is used to produce one unit of economic output. It is a proxy for the efficiency with which a country is able to use energy to produce economic output. A lower ratio indicates that less energy is used to produce one unit of output. Using PPP-based GDP allows cross-country comparisons and map 8.1 shows the variation of energy intensity across countries.
Another published indicator of energy efficiency is PPP-based GDP per kilogram of energy use. Figure 8.1 shows the change over time of this efficiency measure by income group.