Abstract
The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is showing its great influence and leadership on the international energy cooperation. Based on the three-stage DEA model, total-factor energy efficiency (TFEE) in 35 BRI countries in 2015 was measured in this article. It shows that the three-stage DEA model could eliminate errors of environment variable and random, which made the result better than traditional DEA model. When environment variable errors and random errors were eliminated, the mean value of TFEE was declined. It demonstrated that TFEE of the whole sample group was overestimated because of external environment impacts and random errors. The TFEE indicators of high-income countries like South Korea, Singapore, Israel and Turkey are 1, which is in the efficiency frontier. The TFEE indicators of Russia, Saudi Arabia, Poland and China are over 0.8. And the indicators of Uzbekistan, Ukraine, South Africa and Bulgaria are in a low level. The potential of energy-saving and emissions reduction is great in countries with low TFEE indicators. Because of the gap in energy efficiency, it is necessary to distinguish different countries in the energy technology options, development planning and regulation in BRI countries.
Highlights
On 10 September 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping successfully proposed the construction of two major initiatives during a visit to Central Asian and Southeast Asian nations: a “Silk Road Economic Belt” and a “21st Century Maritime Silk Road”, which were collectively called the “Belt & Road initiative” (BRI)
These countries are at forefront of energy efficiency; There is a big margin for improvement for the pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency of the other countries
With the three-stage Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model, calculation results of total factor energy efficiency of 35 Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) countries are obtained with carbon emissions, energy consumption, capital and labor as input variables and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as output variable
Summary
On 10 September 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping successfully proposed the construction of two major initiatives during a visit to Central Asian and Southeast Asian nations: a “Silk Road Economic Belt” and a “21st Century Maritime Silk Road”, which were collectively called the “Belt & Road initiative” (BRI). Several previous studies extended, proposed and applied DEA models for assessing of the efficiency in many fields of energy in various countries, economics and different areas. [32] found that regional industrial eco-efficiency in China is affected by the factors of the environmental regulation, technological innovation, level of economic development and industrial structure, and the national average industrial eco-efficiency declines by 30% after eliminating the impacts of external environment and statistical noise by adopting three-stage DEA approach. [34] used three-stage DEA model to measure total-factor energy efficiency (TFEE) and decomposition variables of 29 provinces of China in 2009. [35] adopted three-stage DEA model to measure energy efficiency level of China. The effects of environment variables to TFEE are compared in this article
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