Received; accepted

The distribution of emission measure, and of heating budget, among the loops in the corona. ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to validate a methodology for connecting the emission measure of individual solar coronal loops to the integrated emission measure of the entire solar corona, and using this connection to deduce the energetic properties of the corona, and then to show how this methodology can be applied to observations of solar-like stellar coronae. The solar validation is carried out by using spatially resolved X-ray observations of the Sun obtained from the Yohkoh satellite. This work is a further step in our effort to place the " solar-stellar connection " on a quantitative footing. In particular, we show how this analysis procedure can be used in the context of archival Einstein, ROSAT and EUVE data, as well as Chandra and XMM Newton data, as a complementary analysis tool to existing multi-thermal component models.