An Empirical Study On The Relationship Between Clean Energy And Economic Growth

As the forerunner of China's reform and opening up,Guangdong Province has gained national attention for its rapid economic development.For the passed 29 years,Guangdong Province has maintained its status as the first class in China's regional gross domestic product,and has become the only province with two first-tier cities.On the contrary,Guangdong Province is extremely short of energy resources.The current situation of energy shortage has become a hindrance for progressing into the next stage of the region economic developments.Therefore,increasing the development and utilization of clean energy and developing green economy have become a major awareness for the effective solution of the energy shortage.In this aspect,this thesis focused on the relationship between clean energy consumption and economic growth,and presents a specific analysis from qualitative and quantitative aspects.Firstly,the current situation of energy and clean energy in Guangdong Province and the regional gross domestic product are analyzed.At the same time,the variables describing the relationship between the two are statistically described,including unit GDP energy consumption and energy consumption elasticity coefficient.Secondly,12 indexes that may affect economic growth are selected for LASSO variable selection,and relatively important indexes are included.The results show that clean energy are important and it has a positive impact on economic growth.The consumption of the source is selected into the model.Then,based on the data of economic growth and clean energy consumption from 1995 to 2016,a two-variable cointegration model is established,and it is found that there is a two-way causal relationship between clean energy and economic growth in Guangdong Province.And the consumption of clean energy mainly affects the development of economy in the way of short-term fluctuation,the long term regulation does not make much progress to the economic growth.Then,select the relevant data from 1990 to 2010 to establish vector auto-regressive model and vector error correction model based on production function.It shows that clean energy consumption will have a sustained positive impact on the regional GDP,but with the passage of time,the impact capacity will be gradually weaken.It has a sustained positive impact on clean energy consumption,but falls back to a lower stable level after reaching the maximum in the second phase.At the end of this paper,the policies recommendations are given out based on the empirical analysis results: adjust the energy consumption structure,reduce the proportion of traditional fossil energy and increase the proportion of clean energy consumption.The focus should be put on increasing the investment in technology research and development and improving the efficiency of energy utilization.