Short-Term Energy Outlook Notice

Released: January 12, 2021

Notice: Beginning in the January Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO), we changed our methodology for reporting world gross domestic product (GDP) in STEO Table 3d. We made these changes to better align the data in our STEO tables with the data we use in our global oil demand models. We will no longer report world, OECD, and non-OECD GDP weighted by oil consumption, but instead, we will report GDP for these regions using a purchasing power parity conversion.

The change affects six STEO data series:

• World Index of Real GDP (rgdpq_world)
• World Index of Real GDP—percent change from prior year (rgdpq_world_pct)
• OECD Index of Real GDP (rgdpq_oecd)
• OECD Index of Real GDP—percent change from prior year (rgdpq_oecd_pct)
• Non-OECD Index of Real GDP (rgdpq_nonoecd)
• Non-OECD Index of Real GDP—percent change from prior year (rgdpq_nonoecd_pct)

In previous editions of the STEO, these variables represented an index of GDP for the respective groups that reflected the weighted geometric mean of countries in the groups with weights equal to each country's share of world oil consumption in a base period.

Going forward, these variables will represent an index where GDP for each country is converted to real U.S. dollars at purchasing power parity, and then the individual countries are summed to create values for the world, OECD, and non-OECD. Source data for these series come from Oxford Economics.

We will no longer show these data series monthly. Values for the World Index of Real GDP will be available quarterly, and OECD and non-OECD values will be available annually. The variable names and codes did not change.