Research On Total-factor Green Energy Efficiency Of Chinese Industries And Its Determinants

Although China has achieved rapid economic growth during the course of industrialization and urbanization, it heavily relies on huge inputs and consumption of energy, which poses a severe challenge to the sustainable development of economy and environment. At present, China is the world's top energy consumer and industrial sectors consume most of the energy. Therefore, a clear picture of energy consumption, pollution-based energy efficiency, energy conservation potential and influencing factors of energy efficiency about industrial sectors is required to achieve the objective of energy conservation and emission reduction proposed by Chinese government. Only in this way can we put forward targeted policies to improve the total-factor energy efficiency. On one hand, this paper takes the technology gap of industrial sectors into account and brings the idea of " meta-frontier" into the traditional efficiency models. On the other hand, it regards pollutants as undesirable outputs so as to calculate the pollution-based total-factor green energy efficiency. At meantime, this paper also analyzes energy conservation potentials of Chinese industrial sectors and influencing factors of its total-factor green energy efficiency.Firstly, based on the parametric meta-frontier approach proposed by Battese, this paper builds the total-factor energy input meta-frontier model of China's 36 industrial sectors from 2001 to 2013 and estimates their energy efficiency. Then, we build a Meta-frontier Super-efficiency SBM input-oriented model and integrate undesirable outputs into it to evaluate the total-factor green energy efficiency of the industry. According to the results, pollution-based total-factor green energy efficiency goes up after a slight decline compared with a relatively steady growth from total-factor energy efficiency. Besides, distinct differences are observed in total-factor green energy efficiency and energy conservation among industries with different factor intensity. Total-factor green energy efficiency of labor-intensive industries is comparably low after 2005 and that of capital-intensive, resource-intensive industries is close to each other. Moreover, average energy conservation potential per year of capital-intensive industries is 2.9 times as large as that of other two kinds of industries. To study the influencing factors, we take IV-GMM method to explore influencing factors of total-factor green energy efficiency and findings are as follows. The proportion of electricity in energy consumption and industrial scale have a positive effect on the improvement of total-factor green energy efficiency. Increasing in energy price and the proportion of state-owned enterprises generates a negative impact on the total-factor green energy efficiency. But R&D investment has a non-significant effect on total-factor green energy efficiency because this variable can't reflect the accumulation of technology. At last, this paper proposes some suggestions on improving total-factor green energy efficiency and meeting the goal of energy conservation and emission reduction.