Energy Efficiency. Soft Input Constraints

The development of human's society is closely linked up with the exploration and utilization of energy. As one of the most important "hard-input" of economic development, energy, which has been out of dominant ecumenists'sight, is taken into consideration all over the world. After the Reform and Opening-up, the situation of China's resources is more pessimistic than optimistic:In one hand, the contradiction between the supply and the demand of resources has been exacerbated by the rapid economic development; In the other hand, the inordinate consumption and the low efficiency of energy also exasperate the environmental pollutions, which would take our great effort to deal with in the future. The improvement in the efficiency of energy could relieve the pressure exerted by environmental pollutions and also exercise a great impact on the improvement of competitiveness of our country. Thereby, the efficiency of resources has become the key target of country's economic scheme and enters into scholars'view. Based on the "Soft-input" theory and other relevant theories including regional economics,econometrics,energy economics, the thesis gives a detailed study about the efficiency of China's energy, the relationship among factors of soft-input, the relation between the efficiency of energy and environmental pollutions, which would contribute a lot to the long-term energy development strategy of the relevant department of energy.At first, the author gives a brief introduction of the previous studies about the Soft-input theory and the efficiency of energy. Because the definition of the efficiency of energy still remains vague, the author divides it into two items:the efficiency of single-factor energy and that of total-factor energy. Then, based on the "Soft-input" theory, the thesis also reviews the previous study of the efficiency of energy.After that, the thesis also gives a detailed study about the efficiency of single-factor energy:first, with the help of PCA, the non-technical integrated factor of soft-input and technical integrated factors are combined together; Second, the relationships between the two integrated factors and the efficiency of single-factor energy are studied from the perspective of cointegration analysis, which concludes that there exists an Long-run equilibrium relationship.Besides, based on the "Soft-input" theory, the thesis construct a model about the affecting factors of the efficiency of single-factor energy at the basis of provincial panel data.Then, under the help of DEA method, the thesis formulates the index of the efficiency of total-factors energy in an ordinal order and the index of total-factors energy at the basis of panel data. Then, from the perspective of cointegration theory, the author analyze the relation between the efficiency of total-factors energy and the non-technical integrated factor of soft-input and technical integrated factors, which concludes that there also exists an invariable balance among them while the non-technical integrated factor of soft-input and technical integrated factors also exercise a great influence on the improvement of the efficiency of the single-factor energy. At the same time, with the help of the model of panel and "soft-input" theory, the author distinguish the factors which influence the comparative efficiency of the total-factor energy, which concludes that the increase of government's interference and the percentage of industry also promote the comparative efficiency of the total-factor energy. Also the increase of the reliance on external trade could improve the comparative efficiency of the total-factor energy.In the end, the author also extends his attention to the environmental pollutions: first, the relation between environmental pollutions and the efficiency of single-factor energy is studied carefully; second, based on the "Soft-input" theory, the author constructs a functional model of environmental pollutions which includes the structure of industry, the structure of energy and the extent of openness. Under the guidance of the stepwise regression analysis, the author analyzes the result of the model and concludes that the environmental pollutions which has a great impact on GDP includes mainly the efficiency of the total-factor energy,the structure of industry and the structure of energy.