Andreas Löschel

How the Energy Transition Impacts Industrial Competitiveness

While at CESifo, Andreas Löschel will be exploring joint research on the economic consequences of the German Energiewende, with a special focus on the implications for industrial competitiveness. Traditionally, energy price comparisons have been used to illustrate energy-related impacts on industrial competitiveness. However, energy unit costs might be a better indicator for industrial competitiveness, as developments in energy intensity are taken into account. An international comparison based on energy unit cost shows that the manufacturing sector in Germany has moderate energy costs relative to the EU27 and other important competitors. This result, however, does not hold for all subsectors within the manufacturing sector and for all energy carriers. In fact, many energy-intensive sectors might be heavily affected by rising energy costs and will face serious risk of relocation – especially given more pronounced policy-driven energy price increases in the energy transition. Mr Löschel's research agenda at CESifo includes developing a robust approach to assess energy-related impacts of the energy transition on industrial competitiveness.

Mr Löschel's research interests are in applied microeconomics, energy economics and the economics of climate change. He has published more than 40 articles in journals of the Social Sciences Citation Index such as Applied Economics, Ecological Economics, Economica, Economics Letters, Energy Economics, Environmental and Resource Economics, European Economic Review, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Journal of Public Economics or the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). In the FAZ Ranking of Economists, he is among the 25 most influential economists in Germany (2013–14).

Andreas Löschel holds a chair for Energy and Resource Economics at the University of Münster and is Director of the Centre of Applied Economic Research Münster (CAWM). He also chairs the Energy Expert Commission of the German Government to monitor the energy transformation. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the research project "Energy Systems of the Future" of the German Academies of Sciences and of the "Research Plattform Energiewende" at the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), is Lead Author of the Global Environment Outlook (GEO-6) of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) (2014–17) and served as Lead Author in the Working Group III contribution to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (2010–14). He is an advisor for Aurora Energy Research Limited, Oxford.

Andreas Löschel studied Economics at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Wayne State University and UCLA. He obtained his PhD from the University of Mannheim (2003) and his Habilitation in Economics from the University of Oldenburg (2009). From 2007 to 2014 he was head of the department "Environmental and Resource Economics" at the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) in Mannheim and since 2010 Professor of Economics at the University of Heidelberg. He was visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (2003), Stanford University (2005), ANU (2010, 2011) and Tsinghua University Beijing (2013).