Russian gas cuts will not kill the German economy

BRUSSELS – MUCH of the conventional wisdom about Europe’s current natural-gas crisis – triggered by reduced deliveries from Russia – rests on two assumptions: that the German economy depends on cheap Russian gas, and that this bet has gone spectacularly wrong. But while German industry is strong, and the country imports a lot of natural gas from Russia, a closer inspection of the numbers and economics involved does not support the prevailing narrative.

For starters, natural gas does not play a large enough role to drive an industrial economy. In 2019, gas imports via pipeline cost Germany US$30 billion, representing only 0.75 per cent of its gross domestic product, and the overall value of the country’s gas consumption was below 2 per cent of GDP. These modest ratios are similar across industrialised economies and suggest that cheap gas imports are highly unlikely to be a major growth factor. Moreover, even though gas consumption has stagnated in Germany and most of Western Europe over the past two decades, the economy grew, albeit slowly.

The argument that cheap Russian gas might have favoured Germany more than other countries also is not backed up by the numbers. In 2019, Germany accounted for only about 2.3 per cent of global natural-gas consumption, but 4.5 per cent of world GDP. Germany’s gas intensity per unit of GDP is thus about one-half of the global average, much lower than that of the United States and many other industrialised countries, including Japan and South Korea.