China's Inter-provincial Trade Of Energy And Environmental Impact

Energy is an important driving force of economic development. With the rapid economic growth, China's energy consumption also will be increased substantially, making the energy shortage being the bottleneck to economic development. Meanwhile, energy consumption has also brought environmental pollution and enormous pressure to the ecological environment, seriously threatening the global climate and human health.Studies have found that included-energy of products is a major component of energy consumption, so embodied energy becomes an important factor of energy consumption. Inter-provincial trade structure should be consistent with the comparative advantage of energy, which serves as a standard to determine the reasonableness of the regional trade structures. The current studies always focus on international trade. As long as China concerned, the energy resource endowments and energy efficiency are various in different regions, so it is meaningful to do some research on inter-provincial trade. According to the comparative advantage of the energy, proper division of labor and inter-provincial trade can decrease the country's energy consumption.Therefore, this article constructs a non-competitive hybrid energy input-output table to measure the energy consumption and pollution flow caused by the inter-provincial trade, then find out the impacts of division of labor and inter-provincial trade to energy and environment. This article makes the comparative advantage of energy as a standard to measure if the inter-provincial trade structure is reasonable.Study has found that some of the provinces which are the main producers of energy-intensive products do not match with the theory of energy comparative advantage. Therefore, this article proposes to adjust the division of labor and inter-provincial trade structure, apply tax subsidies and the promotion of energy saving technology to the main producers of energy-intensive products. These measures will reduce the energy and pollution flows caused by inter-provincial trade, do benefit to the rational allocation of energy, and then promote China's environmental protection.