An Empirical Study On The Relationship Between Energy Consumption And Exports In China

Since China’s reform and opening up, China has got a rapid economic growth. Atthe same time, energy consumption has increased dramatically. China implementsexport-oriented strategy, so exports play a significant role in economic growth.However, the unreasonable structure of export products and low energy efficiency,coupled with serious energy waste, which greatly stimulate the energy consumption.However, with the increasing tension of energy supply, energy is becoming thebottleneck of the further development of exports and economic growth. Reducing theenergy consumption will affect exports? The rapid development of exports will havewhat kind of influence on energy consumption? This dissertation tries to answer thesequestions, and focuses on exports impact on energy consumption.Based on the analysis of the present development of energy consumption andexports, this paper uses both the panel model analysis and factor decompositionmethod to analyze the relationship between energy consumption and exports. Firstly,the descriptive statistics of energy consumption and exports show that both are largescale and rapid growth. Secondly, according to the national and regional levels, thisstudy uses panel data estimation techniques to examine the relationship betweenenergy consumption and exports, including panel unit root test, panel co-integrationtest, and error correction model test. It can be concluded that there is a strong Grangercausality between energy consumption and exports whether it is short-term orlong-term. Thirdly, using the factor decomposition method to estimate the impact ofexports on energy from the industry level, the results show that the effect of thetechnique is negative, while the structure and the scale effect is positive. Besides, thescale effect is much larger than the effect of structure and technique, so the net effectis positive. The results indicate that an increase in the size of the exports is the maincause of energy consumption growth.Finally, based on the empirical analysis, it can be concluded as follows. On theone hand, with the expansion of exports, the demand for energy consumption is stillvery large. On the other hand, energy consumption is in low efficiency at present, ourcountry must continue to improve the energy consumption structure, changing theexisting energy consumption patters from extensive development mode to intensivedevelopment mode.