China’s Net Export Of Embodied Energy In Manufacturing Industries And Its Effect Decomposition

Since China’s entry into WTO, the foreign trade has seen acontinuous rapid development which leads to a great contribution toChina’s national economic development. At the same time, the domesticdemand of energy is increasingly intense. As the “Factory of the World”,China export a large number of cheap manufactured goods. But the hugetrade surplus implies tremendous energy consumption. Based on theinput-output method and the introduction of localization coefficient, thispaper calculates both the direct and total energy consumption coefficients.Taken the imported intermediate products into consideration, this paperestimates the net export of embodied energy of various manufacturingindustries in the decade around China’s accession to the WTO. Then thispaper uses the LMDI model to quantify the effects of the economies ofscale, export structure and energy technology on the change of the netexport of embodied energy.The results show that the net export of the energy consumption whichembodied in manufacturing industries foreign trade has a growing trend;the energy consumption intensity keeps reducing, which means the energyuse efficiency continues to improve. The empirical result shows that thegrowth of economies of scale mainly promotes the net export of embodiedenergy, while the technological progress brings energy saving effect. Themost critical effect is from the export structure: for the industries whichexport a lot or encouraged by government policies, a large part of theembodied energy is consumed for exports; for those which mainly supplydomestic demand or restricted by government policies, it has a negativeeffect. Therefore, to make proper industry policies and reasonable industrystructure adjustments has an essential impact on the environment and energy safety. At the end of this paper, there gives some recommendationfor policy makers.