Has Economic Growth Decoupled from Energy Demand in Latin America? Evidence for Sustainable Energy Transitions

Energy efficiency gains do not necessarily mean that economic growth requires less additional energy. We assess this distinction in ten Latin American economies during 2010–2022, using 122 complete country–year observations and accounting for persistent country differences and shared annual shocks. All ten countries contribute through 2021; only Brazil and Mexico enter in 2022. The estimated income elasticity of energy use per person is 1.001, with an enumerated country wild-bootstrap p-value of 0.023 against zero. To distinguish compatibility with unity from evidence of proportional coupling, we enumerate all 1024 country-level sign patterns separately at each boundary of the illustrative equivalence band [0.9, 1.1]. The resulting equivalence p-value is 0.387: proportional coupling is not established, and the directional test also does not establish relative decoupling. Alternative covariance and lagged-income specifications retain positive associations. Observed fuel-price sensitivities cover 30 observations and remain imprecise. Renewable-share moderation is not supported directionally, while country-level Tapio trajectories vary across periods. With only ten country clusters, limited inferential power constrains the economic classification. The findings support separate monitoring of energy efficiency, per-capita demand and supply decarbonization rather than treating improvements in one as evidence of progress in all three. The estimates describe associations and do not identify causal policy effects.