Abstract
With the development of the economy, environmental pollution caused by energy consumption has become increasingly prominent. Improving the efficiency of energy utilization is an important way to solve this problem. Firstly, we used a data envelopment analysis (DEA) model to calculate the energy utilization efficiency of China’s provinces and regions from the perspective of environmental constraints, including four inputs—labor force, capital stock, energy consumption and carbon emission—and one output, GDP. Secondly, an entity fixed effect model of panel data was built to investigate the influence of openness, urbanization, marketization and industrial structure on energy utilization efficiency in the process of economic structure change. The results indicate that China’s energy efficiency shows a trend of first stabilizing and then declining from 2007 to 2017. Meanwhile, the comprehensive energy efficiency of all provinces and regions is not very ideal. Only Beijing, Shanghai and Guangdong constitute the forefront of China’s energy efficiency. The lack of pure technical efficiency in most provinces is the main reason for the low comprehensive efficiency, but there are also obvious differences among provinces and regions. In addition, urbanization, openness and industrial structure have a negative impact on energy efficiency, while marketization has a significant positive impact on energy efficiency. Finally, based on the regional differences, some suggestions were put forward to improve China’s energy utilization efficiency.
Highlights
With the rapid development of the economy in recent years, China’s energy production and consumption have been growing rapidly, but environmental pollution has been significantly aggravated
We find that previous studies cover countries, regions and industries, but lack analysis of regional differences
Under the framework of total-factor production function, labor, capital and energy consumption are regarded as input variables, and GDP is regarded as an output variable
Summary
With the rapid development of the economy in recent years, China’s energy production and consumption have been growing rapidly, but environmental pollution has been significantly aggravated. It can be found that a variety of input and output factors should be considered when the DEA method is used to calculate energy utilization efficiency. Shi and Zhang explored the influencing factors of energy efficiency using the Tobit regression model and found that market concentration and foreign direct investment had significantly positive effects on industrial energy efficiency [16]. Zhao et al used a three-stage DEA model, and the results showed that economic and energy structure, urbanization rate and R&D investment would affect energy efficiency [17]. Most studies focus on the relationship between technological progress, industrial structure and energy efficiency, with insufficient attention paid to openness, marketization and urbanization. We explore the impact of openness, marketization and urbanization on energy efficiency in the period of economic structure transformation, and put forward some suggestions to improve efficiency
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