A Structural Analysis Of Energy Embodied In The International Trade Of China

As "world factory", China has large surplus in its foreign trade. When the cheap products are exported to the world, there is an enormous growth in China's energy consumption and energy import which pushes up the world energy price, and causes the argument of "China threat". However, is it the truth that all china's energy consumption is consumed by Chinese people? Based on an analysis of national input-output and energy input tables, this paper estimates amount of energy embodied in import and export commodities of each industry during 2006 and 2007, so as to examine the impact of trade on domestic energy consumption. According to our results, the total embodied energy in export was 8.62×10~8tce in 2006 and 9.18×10~8tce in 2007, taking up about 35% and 34.6% of annual energy consumption respectively. This means that, each year, about 1/3 of domestic energy consumption was exported to the world via commodity trade. On structure of energy-embodied-exporting industry, there were several industries with lower total energy intensity coefficient accounting for much of embodied energy export, due to immense export volume. In 2007, the export ratio of top eighth most energy-intensified industries reached 20.7%, while export ratio of embodied energy 39.7%. At the same time, export of some industry increased yet embodied energy export decreased as a result of improved energy utilizing rate. The discrepancies of embodied energy export among industries, together with improved energy utilizing rate, helped to increase commodity export by 25.7% in 2007 compared to 2006, but only 6.5% for embodied energy export. This pointed to that the exporting commodity structure was shaped toward lower energy-intensified industries. For import, different energy consumption coefficient led to higher commodity import ratio than embodied-energy import ratio in some industries, while the opposite in some other industries. Among 22 industries studied, the import ratio of top eighth industries with highest total energy intensity coefficient accounted for 31% of import; while among top eighth industries with most import volume, half of them were energy-intensified, and most industries with moderate embodied-energy import ratio were also energy-intensified. In the industry structure, the above characteristic had caused 1tce higher average energy consumption per 10,000 dollar trade volume in import industries than in export industries. In the end, the paper proposes some policy suggestions according to the results, such as lowering export drawback for energy-intensified goods, rising the taxes for export energy-intensified goods, cutting the export quota, strengthening the restriction for export of energy-intensified goods through taxation and administrative methods, etc.