دانلود رایگان مقاله آیا مصرف انرژی در میان استان های چین پایدار است؟

abstract

With the advent of China's reformation and open policy, its economy and levels of urbanization experienced explosive growth. However, the widely employed “high input, high pollution” style of resource consumption violates the green growth principle, and is imposing increasing pressure on both the energy infrastructure and the environment. Due to the complex relationships between resources, energy, urbanization, and the environment, it is imperative to explore methods that maximize total-factor energy efficiency and reduce environmental pollution, to achieve green growth. The slack-based measure (SBM) of efficiency was used to evaluate the totalfactor energy efficiencies of 29 Chinese provinces for specific periods. Further, we leveraged the Malmquist index to explore efficiency trends from 2005 to 2014. The results show that urbanization and energy efficiency are positively correlated, whereas decreasing ratings in some provinces indicate economic recession or severe environmental pollution. Almost two-thirds of the measured provinces are energy inefficient, but have shown slow but clear improvement, indicating the huge potential for growth. Based on the findings, Chinese provinces are allocated to three categories, and policy recommendations and implementation measures are discussed, for improving total-factor energy efficiency nationwide.

4. Conclusion

To coordinate the new models of economic development and urbanization, it is vital to explore the total-factor energy efficiency of each region of China in order to strike a balance between energy usage and the control of environmental pollution. This study employs indicators of inputs and outputs through the entropy method and empirical study. The innovation of selecting indicators stems from our consideration of previous work concerning total-factor energy efficiencies, combined with realistic circumstances for provincial development, and the introduction of an increased urbanization rate as a desirable output, all of which make the results more objective and comprehensive. Pearson correlation analyses were performed to further investigate the applicability of the SBM model. Positive correlations were observed between inputs and desirable outputs, while there were negative correlations between inputs and undesirable outputs. Subsequently, the SBM model and Malmquist index method were used to analyze total-factor energy efficiency performance at the provincial level from 2005 to 2014. The SBM model provides the relative efficiencies of every province, but does not show how individual provinces change over time. Additionally, the Malmquist exponent was examined to obtain the relative annual rates of improvement for each province. The advantage of this approach is that it reveals aspects that might otherwise be neglected. For example, some cities have higher relative efficiency, but decreasing Malmquist exponent each year, which indicates that the city does not have the capability to achieve sustainable and green development. The results showed that only one-fifth of China's 29 provinces are total-factor energy efficient while others are much weaker. Developed provinces such as Beijing and Guangdong have maintained stable and relatively high levels of efficiency. One explanation could be that developed cities always place greater emphasis on environmental protection with their inherent developmental advantages of economic growth and urbanization. It is recognized that a large gap exists between provinces, because the indicators have different impacts on the total-energy efficiency of different provinces. The data show that the relative efficiency of most provinces starts to deteriorate from 2011.