The Studies On The Relationship Between China's Energy Consumption And Economic Growth

The sustained, rapid and stable economic development in China has stimulated rapid increase in energy consumption, and along with the effect of indirect energy exports situation which is called "world factory", the imbalance between energy supply and demand has become increasingly prominent. At present, the international energy prices continue to rise, and according to the International Energy Agency's forecast the fossil energy is still the main source of energy supply right up to 2030, so the research on the relationship between energy consumption and economic growth in China is of great significance.This paper firstly reviews the related research on energy consumption and economic growth, and finds their relationship is not clear. Then it makes theoretical analysis by using the relative theory from three aspects including the resources constraints, energy demand and technological innovation. The results show that the problem that world economic growth is restricted by total amount of fossil energy will be solved through the science and technology innovation to develop renewable energy. However, the 2008 financial crisis will reduce energy demand, and the world economic growth will be slow in the future. Furthermore, it analyzes the current situation and existing problems of energy consumption in China, and makes relevant international comparison from three perspectives of energy efficiency, energy structure and energy policy.Secondly, the paper studies the dynamic characteristics of the energy consumption and economic growth with the statistics data from 1953 to 2006 and finds they have the possibility of structure break. And then this paper applies endogenous structural break unit root tests(concluding endogenous one-break and two-breaks structural changes),and finds that the energy consumption and GDP can be more accurately characterized as a segmented trend stationary process around two structural breaks, which indicates that the government-led energy policy and economic development strategy for a period of time(that is, before the next impact) is effective. On this basis, this paper also analyze the causality between GDP and energy consumption after removing the trend effects, and the result shows there exists bi-directional causality between both of them, which means China is not only energy-dependent economy, but also driving energy consumption economy. Finally, according to the theoretical and empirical study results, the countermeasures on the economic growth and energy development in China is put forward from four aspects, including promoting industrial structure upgrade, optimizing energy consumption structure, technological innovation and improving energy reserve system.