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Improvement pathway of energy consumption structure in China's industrial sector: From the perspective of directed technical change

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  • Yang, Zhenbing
  • Shao, Shuai
  • Yang, Lili
  • Miao, Zhuang

Abstract

The improvement in energy consumption structure is of great significance to the green transformation of economic development. In this paper, to explore the reasonable improvement pathway of energy consumption structure in China's industrial sector, we treat fossil energy and non-fossil energy as two different factors into the production function, and conduct a stochastic frontier analysis to estimate the factor-biased degree of production technical change and the substitution elasticities between factors. The results show that the production technology of China's industrial sector is more biased to fossil energy and labor and deviated from non-fossil energy and capital. There is a substitution relationship between capital and labor, as well as labor and fossil energy, and the relationship between capital and fossil energy is complementary. We find that the energy consumption structure in most industrial sub-sectors has a large room for improvement. We propose that the Chinese government should promote the market-oriented reform of energy pricing mechanism to improve the energy consumption structure based on the differentiated characteristics of the energy consumption structures of different industrial sub-sectors.

Suggested Citation

  • Yang, Zhenbing & Shao, Shuai & Yang, Lili & Miao, Zhuang, 2018. "Improvement pathway of energy consumption structure in China's industrial sector: From the perspective of directed technical change," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 72(C), pages 166-176.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:eneeco:v:72:y:2018:i:c:p:166-176
    DOI: 10.1016/j.eneco.2018.04.003
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Energy consumption structure; Fossil energy; Non-fossil energy; Directed technical change; Fixed-effect stochastic frontier analysis; Industrial sector;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • L60 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Manufacturing - - - General
    • O13 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Agriculture; Natural Resources; Environment; Other Primary Products
    • O14 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Industrialization; Manufacturing and Service Industries; Choice of Technology
    • O33 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes
    • Q42 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Energy - - - Alternative Energy Sources
    • Q43 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Energy - - - Energy and the Macroeconomy

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