In the past China's rural areas, home to 70% of its population, suffered energy shortages. China's indigenous energy resources are limited, with the exception of coal. The widespread use of coal requires large investments in production and transport -making it costly-, and degrades the environment. As a result the Chinese government has implemented an energy policy that aims at the use of renewable energy resources and increasing energy efficiency. For this the Chinese government has reorganised its institutional framework, which now aims at learning and improving profitability to diffuse technologies. Simultaneously the decision to use a technology has been shifted from officials to the consumers and profitability of a technology has become the main decision criterion. This paper analyses the effect of learning and profitability in technology diffusion and looks at the effectiveness of the institutional efforts.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Tilburg University, Center for Economic Research in its series Discussion Paper with number
6.
Find related papers by JEL classification: Q42 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Energy - - - Alternative Energy Sources Q48 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Energy - - - Government Policy O32 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Technological Change - - - Management of Technological Innovation and R&D C99 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Other
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: