Research On The Causes And Effects Of Energy Intensity Change In China

As a comprehensive index of reflecting energy efficiency, not only was energy intensity effected by economic structure and energy efficiency, but also was effected by energy structure, resource, mechanism of energy price, economic system and so on. At the same time, the change of energy intensity will affect energy policy and environmental quality a lot.This dissertation, combining normal research and empirical analysis, applying qualitative and quantitative analysis methods, emphasizes on the influencing factors and effects of energy intensity changing. Contributions of this dissertation are as follows:1. Influencial factors of energy intensity changes. This dissertation proposes a decomposition model containing industrial structure share, sectoral energy efficiency share and energy consumption structure share and chooses the geometric mean as the weight coefficient of the decomposition model. The model successfully separates the energy structure share from the economic structure share and energy intensity share, overcomes the shortcoming when the data set appears in the zero value causing greater error and presentes a multi-factor decomposition method being of exact accuracy. Due to the multi-factors which influence regional energy intensity, the data contain the cross-section, time and space crossing information with a multi-dimensional characteristics. This dissertation sets up a vector panel data cointegration and error correction model which can reflect the regional energy intensity and the clustering characteristics of the influential factors. It quantitatively studies the long and short term factors which influence the changes of regional energy intensity. This model focus on the study of regional energy intensity issue, spreads the two-dimensional structure to multi-dimensional structure, fully diges the sample information and overcome the cross-section model and time series model on setting bias and multicollinearity problems.2. Effect of energy intensity changes. This dissertation proposes the calculating method based on the concept of energy consumption rebound effect. The method reveals the influence mechanism of energy price on changes in energy intensity and sets up the relationship between the theory of factor substitution effects and the effect of changes in energy intensity. Therefore, a theoretical analysis framework of measuring the rebound effect which is generated by the substitution effect can be obtained. Based on the study methods of input-output elasticity, this dissertation combines the study of energy consumption with the study of industry association, define the concepts of sectoral energy consumption elasticity coefficient, calculate the mathematical derivation to proof its economic implications and put forward the method on indentifying the sectoral energy consumption and confirming the main sector of energy consumption according to the above two elasticity coefficient. According to this approach, it is more pertinent to formulate industrial and energy policy and keep sustainable economic development as well as the sustainable use of energy.3. The environmental impact of energy intensity changes and the study of spatial environmental Kuznets curve. This dissertation constructs the associated model of energy, economy and the environment, studies the environmental influence which results from the changes of energy intensity and the economic growth, and make up for the deficiencies of the existing studies. By using spatial econometric model and method, the dissertation studies the Environmental Kuzbets Curve(EKC) which uses the emission of CO2 due to energy consumption as the index of China and the around countries and regions. The model and the method putes energy consumption and the environmental issues into a unified framework to research, considering the spillover space in the economic and environmental problems. It is not only able to overcome the issue resulting from biased and inconsistent in the common parameter estimation, but also able to explain the instability of the subset when estimating the EKC.