Research On The Level And Employment Effect Of Energy Industry Technical Progress In China

Along with the rapid expansion of the social economy, it is increasingly prominentsuch as the problems of environmental pollution, resource waste, excessive energyconsumption. It is the effective measure to solve the contradiction between socialeconomic development and environmental protection that realizing the technologicalinnovation and progress in the progress of energy exploitation, manufacture andmachining. But the previous research shows that the technical progress gives direct orindirect influence to employment, promoting employment actively as well asrestraining negatively. The technical progress increases employment when theenterprises expand the scale of production, expand production chain and increase theworkers’ education time, and when there is labor flow between international. Thetechnical progress restrains employment when the enterprises are the fittest, machinestake the place of the workers, and the labor demand structure becomes unbalanced.Aiming at improving the scientific and technological level of energy industry, andrealizing the win-win target of rising employment and protecting environment, therelationship between the technical progress and employment is explored in the paper.On the basis of summarizing and analyzing the employment effect of technicalprogress, the levels during the period of1985-2011in energy industry are measuredby the methods of Solow residual and Malmquist index. The measuring results oftechnical progress in energy industry shows that the technological development in thisindustry goes through two stages. The first stage is the period of1985-1999, in whichthe industry technology level increased slowly and got average annual growth rate of1.38%. The second stage is the period of2000-2011, in which the level increasedrapidly and got a rate of11.97%. Among that, the technical progress level of electricpower and heating power is the highest, the petroleum processing and coking, andnuclear fuel processing are the second, and the last are the coal mining, washing,petroleum and oil extraction.Through comparing, the results of Solow residual are selected to build up theSVAR model combining with employment status. Then the methods of impulse response function and variance decomposition are applied to analyze the employmenteffect empirically. The results indicate the following conclusions. The first, theinfluence of technical progress to employment is hysteretic and long-term. The second,in the period of1985-2011, the promoting action was stronger than inhibiting effect,which shows the positive influence of technological innovation to employment inenergy industry. The third, the substitution effect is stronger than compensation effectin the energy mining (including coal mining, washing, petroleum and oil extraction),but the variance decomposition results show the influence is feeblish. The fourth, thecreation effect is stronger than damage effect in the energy processing and utilization(including production and supply of electric power and heating power, petroleumprocessing and coking, and nuclear fuel processing), and the influence is strong.Therefore, it is suggested that the policy of technology and employment be adoptedat the same time. The industry chain in the energy mining should be extended andrefined, when developing the energy processing and utilization. Meanwhile the skillsof workers should be improved and the high-tech talents be trained.