Study On The Relationship Between China's Technology Progress And Energy Efficiency

As one of the necessary production factors, energy plays an important role in promoting national economic development. At present, China is the largest developing country in the world, also is the second-biggest consumer of energy. With the growth of China's industrialization and the expansion of economic scale, economic growth is more and more depending on energy resource and energy demand continues to increase. However, due to the reasons such as the shortage of energy resource and serious waste of energy, China's energy supply is insufficient. The contradiction between energy supply and demand is becoming the main bottleneck that restricts our country's economy progress. In addition, problems such as extremely high degree of dependence upon foreign energy, unreasonable energy consumption structure and serious environmental pollution bring great pressure to ensure the sustainable development of China's economy and national energy strategy security. For solving these problems, therefore, it's necessary to find measures to reduce energy intensity and improve energy efficiency.Since reform and opening-up, planned economy has been transferring into market economy which market is increasingly playing a fundamental role in resources distribution. Influenced by such factors as the development of market economy, the raising of R&D input, the expansion of technology spillover effect and the improving of human resources'quality, China's technology progress has made a substantial development. Technology progress helped improve energy efficiency which saving energy resources for our country. But owing to the existing of rebound effect, while technology progress improves energy efficiency, it promotes the rapid development of China's economy and brings a heavy demand of energy consumption. So it requires a deep-going, comprehensive study to discuss how technology progress improves energy efficiency and whether only relying on technology progress could solve the serious energy problems in China.In this dissertation, firstly the existing problems of china's technology progress, energy supply and consumption are analyzed according to the current situation. Then based on time series data from1978 to 2009, the empirical analysis model about the relationship between China's technology progress and energy efficiency is constructed and estimated by cointegration analysis, error correction model (ECM) and ridge regression analysis. Finally, feasible measures to improve energy efficiency and solve energy problems are proposed according to the conclusion drawn from the empirical analysis and basic national conditions analysis.