Measuring Efficiency Of Energy Using And Carbon Dixiode Emissions: Total Factor Perspective

Addressing the twin challenges of energy security and climate change is the consensus of the international community.As the biggest developing country, China has a huge demand to energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions in the process of industrialization and urbanization.To achieve target of energy saving and emission reduction is a practise issue in this sitution.Measuring the efficiency of energy using and carbon dioxide emissions is the subject of this paper. It hopes that the scientific evaluation could provide theoretical and practical support for government departments.So that the excessive growth of energy consumption and rapid rise of carbon dioxide emissions can be inhibited.The main research work and conclusions are as fllows:(1)Proposing a new idea to measure energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions from the perspective of total factor. According to the defects of single factor indicators, such as energy intensity, carbon intesnsity, an idea of using total factor indicators is proposed with productivity thory. In this framework, energy is regarded as an importmant input and carbon dioxide is treated as undesirable output.(2) Analyzing the changes of total factor energy efficiency and its impact elements. Total factor energy efficiency indicator is constructed using DEA and an empirical research of China is carried out.It is found that the overall energy efficiency increases first and then decreases in the sample period. Low efficiency and large regional disparities is the main characteristic. View of the basic role of technical elements and the misunderstanding of technology, the impact of"hard"technology and"soft"technology on energy efficiency is analyed.And the contributions of"hard"technology shoud be strengthed.(3) Proposing total factor carbon dioxide emissions efficiency models and they are applied in China and world. First, carbon dioxide is treated as undesirable output and the static and dynamic total factor carbon dioxide efficiency models are contructed using environmental production technology, directional distance function and Malmquist productivity index. Second, combining metafrontier function, other carbon dioxide emissions efficiency models and their decomposition models are proposed when technology gap is considered. The application in China indicates that carbon dioxide emissions efficiency improved 40.86% over the period. Economic development and industry structure are the main positive external factors and the efficiency difference between eastern, central and western is also found. Meanwhile, there are still great potential for emission reduction and the technology gap between different regions widened. For international comparison, Asia, Europe and America improved their carbon dioxide emissions efficiency more or less. The most is Europe, then Americas and followed by Asian. In the main emitters, the United States is the typical of high-efficiency and China is the country with the largest improvement.(4)Proposing economic efficiency models and carbon dioxide regulation cost models when energy input and carbon dioxide output are considered together and an empirical research about China is given. Using environmetal production and directional distance function, single economic efficiency model, requiring expanding GDP only, Two-dimension economic efficiency model, requiring expanding GDP and reducing emissions with the same proportion and two-stage economic efficiency model requiring expangding GDP first and reducing emissons second are contructed. The main results show that economic efficiency is not high in China and more than half of proviences have high incoordination between economy and carbon dioxide. In general, more stringent carbon regulation has more impact on GDP output, but the performances of provinces are different.