Electricity and economic output: two South African signals.
Put South Africa’s electricity consumption per person beside total GDP in constant dollars. Keep separate units, align the years and inspect proportional change without inferring a causal relationship.
Keep each measure in its original unit.
Electricity consumption · South Africa
kilowatt-hours per person
Total GDP · South Africa
constant 2015 US$
Only years with present values in both inputs enter this view. Gaps remain gaps; an absent observation is not zero.
Two datasets, two different questions
The electricity series measures kilowatt-hours per person. The GDP series measures constant 2015 US$. One is expressed per person; the other describes total economic output. Their raw numbers cannot be subtracted or treated as interchangeable.
For the latest shared year, 2023, the source records 3,247 for electricity consumption per person and $363,885,280,376 for total GDP in South Africa. These are observations for that reporting year, not a claim about current-day demand or output.
A shared annual period makes the timing explicit. It does not show that electricity use caused output to change, estimate a statistical relationship, or measure electrical efficiency. The population denominators, sector coverage and source methods matter; each source definition appears below.
Make the comparison reproducible
The source contracts, exact reporting identities, original values, revision IDs and annual periods travel with this article’s input manifest. Open the workspace to change inputs or the year range. Its saved comparisons remain free.
Separate growth from the starting level.
Each series independently starts at 100 in 2000. Calculate: its value in a year ÷ its own value in 2000 × 100. A common index compares proportional change, while the original units and meanings remain different.
This index is eligible because the shared baseline is positive and the aligned quantity values are non-negative. It is not a causal result, a forecast, or a purchasing-power comparison.
Underlying observations
Download input manifestDownload aligned CSV with source revisions