Abstract
In the 13th Five-Year Plan, the Chinese government declared that one of the sustainable policy priorities is improving the energy supply composition in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In accordance with the Plan, the Guangdong government subsequently planned to invest in low-carbon energy infrastructure from 2016 to 2020. Using data from Guangdong province and other regions in China for 2007–2016, we propose a two-stage network data envelopment analysis (Network DEA) model to examine the sustainable performance of the Chinese regional/provincial economic system. We postulated that the less sustainable performance of Chinese regional economic systems may be attributed to lower energy productivity performance. However, we found that increased governmental and industrial spending on electricity mix improvement by building new low-carbon power plants created momentum in Guangdong’s economic growth, which experienced an annual rise of roughly 1.16%. Finally, the results from the two-stage Network DEA model showed that Guangdong fared better than other provinces with respect to sustainable performance. Investment in low-carbon energy infrastructure is not only a measure to combat CO2 emission, but could act as the driving force of regional economic systems.
Highlights
One of the inherent administrative objectives of governments is to promote social development while facilitating economic prosperity
Governments today are concerned with sustainable performance in addition to the traditional economic gain
We used the two-stage Network data envelopment analysis (DEA) model and Leontief I-O model to evaluate the sustainable performance of regional economic system in China and the impacts of sustainable policy: the effects of low-carbon energy infrastructure investment on the sustainability performance of Guangdong
Summary
One of the inherent administrative objectives of governments is to promote social development while facilitating economic prosperity. For this task, the infrastructure investment budget is a typical financial instrument used by regulators as the exogenous force to stimulate demand in intermediate and final goods, so that additional transactions accelerate economic growth. Among the many resources required to support economic development, energy is always indispensable. In this sector, the overdependence on fossil fuels had gone unchallenged until recent years [1]. The trend of revolutionizing traditional fossil fuel combustion power plants in order to curb CO2 emissions is essential to long-term sustainability policies worldwide
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