Energy rebound effect associated with energy efficiency: an application to China’s agricultural sector

Abstract

With the process of agricultural modernization, energy consumption in China’s agriculture has increased significantly these years. Based on this context, this study tries to investigate the rebound effect of China's agricultural energy consumption, and how the popularization of agricultural machinery impacts on energy rebound rate. Elasticity analysis and data envelopment analysis based on meta-frontier are used to conduct the research, which can make the energy rebound rate more accurate compared with previous studies. Some important findings are obtained based on these methods. First, it confirms that the energy consumption in China’s agricultural sector has significant rebound effect due to technical progress, which averages 0.7215 in short term and 0.5283 in long term. This indicates that the improvement of energy efficiency can only achieve 27.85 and 47.17% of the expected energy-saving target in the short and long term. Second, there is a distinct difference in energy rebound rate in China’s different regions, the eastern area has been always far ahead of central and western regions, which implies that it is more difficult for eastern region to achieve energy saving relying on technological progress. Third, the population of mechanization increased the energy rebound rate by 0.0002 temporarily and 0.0004 permanently in the research sample. Based on these research results, some important policy implications are recommended to reduce energy rebound rate for China’s agricultural sector.