The relationship between LNG price, LNG revenue, non-LNG revenue and government spending in China: An empirical analysis based on the ARDL and SVAR model

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The present paper examines the dynamic relationship between liquefied natural gas (LNG) price, LNG revenue, non-LNG revenue and government spending (GOVS) in China using autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) and structural vector auto-regressive (SVAR) model. The goal of carrying out ARDL and SVAR together is to consolidate and strengthen the consistency of the results obtained from both approaches. ARDL results show that a positive influence relationship between both short-run and long-run LNG prices, LNG revenue, non-LNG revenue and GOVS, but there was no significant relationship between LNG price and GOVS. The SVAR also substantiates the results of ARDL test and provides further insight which shows that long-run fiscal synchronization hypothesis is evidenced between the LNG revenue and GOVS, while spend-tax hypothesis exists in the long-run between GOVS and non-LNG revenue. It is also evidenced that there is a complementary relationship between LNG revenue and non-LNG revenue, but this complementary role is stronger than the substitution role. Since non-LNG revenue has a greater impact on GOVS in the short-run, and the impact of LNG prices and LNG revenue on GOVS in the long-run increases over time, thus, GOVS mitigates the direct impact of non-LNG revenue to some extent, and that an appropriate allocation of spending in the non-LNG industry will have a positive impact on the development of the market economy supporting the Keynesian and spend-tax hypothesis.