• Energy Research

Abstract The Chinese government has taken measures to realize energy-savings and emission reductions, such as promoting innovations, adjusting the industrial structure, balancing regional development, and reforming markets. The aim of this paper is to assess the effects of these measures on China's CO2 emissions by using a newly proposed decomposition approach, which identified eight new factors related to the above realistic measures, i.e., energy saving and production technologies, industrial energy and production efficiencies, regional energy and production efficiencies, and pure energy and production efficiencies. The main findings indicate benefits from considerable technological progress in energy-saving and production during 2000–2016 period, and two technological factors contributed the most to emissions abatement and cumulatively reduced 5372.43 Mt and 1291.72 Mt CO2 emissions. The efforts of industrial restructuring promoted energy and production efficiency improvement, which further facilitated emission reduction. In contrast, the pure energy and production efficiency changes cumulatively led to 1080.26 Mt and 1135.85 Mt CO2 emissions growth during the whole sample period, suggesting that severe resource misallocation problems may exist in both the energy market and output market. Additionally, the Chinese government failed to narrow the technology gap between developed regions and underdeveloped regions, further restricting emission reduction.

On March 24, 2015, a political bureau meeting of the Communist Party of China Central Committee first proposed the political task of "greening" and placed unprecedented importance on the construction of an ecological civilization, aiming to guide China's economy and society toward green and low carbon development. This study aims to examine the impact of this "greening" policy on China's climate change mitigation. First, from an emissions reduction perspective, this study interprets greening as the process of constantly strengthening society's awareness and willingness regarding emissions reduction. Then, this study incorporates a carbon abatement willingness factor into a nonparametric model, and quantitatively simulates the impact of greening on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions reduction in China. The results show that China can rapidly decrease its CO2 emissions in the early stages of greening. However, when greening passes a certain stage, it no longer affects CO2 emissions. Thus, the willingness to reduce emissions has a diminishing marginal effect on emissions reduction. Additionally, throughout the greening process, China is expected to reduce its CO2 emissions by 36.08%, or 3718.50 million tons. Finally, the impact of greening on China's CO2 emissions exhibits spatial variation, as its undeveloped western region can achieve greater CO2 emissions reductions by promoting greening. Base on the above results, corresponding policy implications are also provided at the end of this paper.

Abstract Nowadays, the metal industry has become an important source of China's energy consumption and environmental pollution. With the tightening of resources and environmental constraints and the calls for green development, transforming the development mode and improving green total-factor productivity (TFP) of China's metal industry become the only way to help China get out of the dual dilemmas of resources depletion and environmental degradation. By applying a meta-frontier approach, this paper investigates the sources of green TFP changes and its inefficiency of China's metal industry during 2000–2015, from regional and provincial perspectives. The results show that: (1) green TFP in China's metal industry increased by 11.52% annually. Technological progress is the most critical driving factor and the reduction of regional technology gap plays a certain role in promoting green TFP growth, while declines in scale efficiency and pure technical efficiency are two inhibitors; (2) the current green TFP of China's metal industry is relatively low and green TFP inefficiency mainly comes from three aspects, i.e., technology gap, scale inefficiency, and pure technical inefficiency; (3) Because the sources of green TFP inefficiency in metal industry and the potential for green TFP gains show distinct spatial characteristics, this paper takes a further step to formulate specific strategies for metal industries in each of China's provinces to improve their green TFPs, from three aspects of bridging the technology gap, adjusting industrial scale, and upgrading management level.

In some cases, enterprise fears uncertainty more than the policy itself, and this fear can impede innovation. However, this study finds that uncertainty is the source of enterprise’s innovation. We took Chinese A-share listed companies from 2010 to 2018 as the research sample and studied the impact of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on green technology innovation (GTI). Based on China’s EPU index and green patent-application data of Chinese-listed enterprises, this study adopted a panel fixed regression model and found that EPU has a slightly promoting effect on GTI of Chinese-listed enterprises. This effect is also affected by enterprise ownership and industry characteristics. Among them, EPU has a stronger promoting effect on GTI activities of state-owned enterprises and high-tech enterprises than common enterprises. In particular, if EPU increases, the GTI of high-polluting enterprises is not as great as the incentive effect of ordinary enterprises. The reasons may be that state-owned enterprises have more implicit capital guarantees, high-tech enterprises have higher innovation motivation, and high-polluting enterprises have stronger dependence on traditional production equipment. These results can provide a reference for the debate on “uncertainty.” The conclusions of this paper contain unique policy implications.

Abstract Based on its economic development and population expansion, China has become one of the most important countries in terms of accounting for materials used worldwide. A deeper understanding of how material use has evolved in China is needed to devise appropriate policies in the future. This paper applied a logarithmic mean Divisia index (LMDI) to decompose the driving forces of changes in China's material use during the 2002–2012 period into five component effects: population, activity, structural, intensity and material structural effects. In addition, a decoupling index was used to further analyse the decoupling relationship between China's material use and gross output per capita. The results show that Chinese material use has risen from 11.8 billion tonnes in 2002 to 35 billion tonnes in 2012 and that the economic activity effect is the largest positive contributor to the growth in material use, followed by material structural effect, population effect and structural effects. The material intensity effect positively promoted the increase in material use during the 2002–2007 period, although it played a negative role during the 2007–2012 period. A province-level analysis reveals substantial heterogeneity. Some provinces exhibit falling material use, although in most provinces, material use significantly increases. The decoupling analysis indicates that relative decoupling and no decoupling effects characterize the main conditions across the provinces during the study period. Policy recommendations are then made based on our findings.

This paper discusses the compensation standard for exhaust pollution and devises a compensation mechanism for Macao's tourism-related transport sector based on an integration of chemical exergy and universal exergy, using data on gasoline consumption by automobile sector retrieved from the transportation industry. The results reveal that: (1) the exergy values of air pollutant emissions increased from 1.53 × 1012 kJ in 2010 to 2.03 × 1012 kJ in 2019 (an increase of 1.33 times), and the exergy of CO, NOx, and SO2 emissions accounted for 77.5%, 20.4% and 2.1% of total exhaust emissions in Macao respectively. (2) In 2019, the monetary value of emission exergy, and the environmental costs of air pollution, were 1.7 times greater than in 2010. (3) If Light Rail Transit is compensated for, then the mean interval's values of the upper and lower limits of the compensation standard are 0.55 USD and 0.05 USD, respectively. When gasoline tax is used as a means of compensation it is necessary to raise its rate by about 8% based on the tax rate. A three-stage bargaining game model is used to provide evidence that this compensation standard is practical and acceptable.

Abstract Revealing the decoupling process between global economy and its carbon emissions is a key breakthrough point to seek the pathways of global low-carbon economic development. The aim of this study is to identify determinant factors of decoupling carbon emissions from global economic growth, by using the panel data of 78 regions during 2000–2017 and the Tapio model with a comprehensive decomposition framework. The results show that: (1) the global decoupling relationship experienced five stages: weak decoupling, expansive coupling, expansive negative decoupling, recessive decoupling, and strong decoupling. Overall, Europe and North America largely contributed to global decoupling process (−6.51% and −2.37%, respectively), while Asia is the opposite (99.12%); (2) the technology progress in energy-saving (−203.28%) and production efficiency (−93.51%) played the principal roles in promoting global decoupling, energy structure optimization (−9.7%) also exerted active effects in promoting decoupling process; (3) however, the per capita gross domestic product growth (192.37%), and population expansion (48.8%) formed restriction in global carbon-economy decoupling process.

Because industrial sector in China is energy-intensive, clarifying the main factors driving CO2 emissions in this sector is of great importance for the carbon emission reduction and further sustainable development of China's economy. This paper combines production-theoretical decomposition analysis (PDA) and index decomposition analysis (IDA) to decompose China's industrial CO2 emission changes into seven factors: energy mix change, potential energy intensity change, economic activity, energy usage efficiency, energy saving technology change, GDP technical efficiency, and GDP technology change. The main findings are as follows: (1) during 2000–2015, industrial CO2 emissions increased 2.6560 times, economic activity was the largest contributor to increasing industrial CO2 emissions but varied significantly across provinces. (2) GDP technology change and potential energy intensity change were the dominant contributors to industrial CO2 mitigation. However, in several western provinces, potential energy intensity change played a positive role in increasing CO2 emissions. Therefore, local governments should adopt effective measures to improve technology levels in western provinces. (3) Energy-saving technology change also led to a reduction in CO2 emissions in most provinces, although its inhibiting effect was very small (annual average decrease rates were less than 3%). (4) Energy mix change, energy usage efficiency, and GDP technical efficiency played insignificant roles in affecting industrial CO2 emissions and had mixed results across provinces. This detailed information about the factors driving industrial CO2 emissions will be important for central and local governments in China in formulating emission-reduction policies.

Abstract The current mode of production in China is extensive and inefficient and has caused great stress on both resources and the environment. This paper focuses on analyzing the sources of production inefficiency and productivity growth in China. Here, a developed slacks-based measure is utilized to decompose production inefficiency into three components: input inefficiency, economic output inefficiency, and environmental inefficiency. Furthermore, by applying a method based on global data envelopment analysis, we take a further step to analyze the key factors responsible for the change of environmental productivity during 2003–2011 from the point of view of technical progress, productive scale, and management level. The results show that, redundancy in energy and labor inputs, and excessive emission of sulfur dioxide, chemical oxygen demand, and ammonia nitrogen, are the main sources of production inefficiency in China. During the sample period, the efficiency in all inputs and environmental emissions has improved (except for capital input efficiency, which had a decreasing trend). Further analysis shows that the overall environmental productivity in China has begun to follow an ascending path. Technical progress is the most powerful contributor to China's productivity growth, while the decreases in scale and management efficiency are the two main obstacles preventing productivity improvement.

This study uses a combined data envelopment analysis and logarithmic mean Divisia index (DEA-LMDI) method to decompose affecting factors for PM2.5 emissions into effects related to the potential emission intensity (PEI), environmental efficiency and technology, production efficiency and technology, regional economic structure, and national economic growth, and investigates differences in the effects on PM2.5 emissions, considering the diversity among different areas and periods in China. This study provides a new insight in the decomposition method, which can decompose the emissions into new effects compared with the exiting studies. This study reveals that the regional environmental-based technology (EBT) effect is the key curbing factor for PM2.5 emissions, followed by the regional PEI effect. The curbing effect of regional EBT on PM2.5 emissions is strong in East China and weak in Northeast China. The environment-oriented scale efficiency (ESE), environment-oriented management efficiency (EME), production-oriented scale efficiency (PSE), production-oriented management efficiency (PME), and production-based technology (PBT) had relatively small effects on PM2.5 emissions on the whole. The effects differ among different areas and periods in China. The emission reduction potential of these efficiency effects has not been realized. The national economic growth greatly promotes PM2.5 emissions. The regional economic structure effect slightly increases PM2.5 emissions because of the unbalanced development of regional economy. The relative policy suggestions are put forward based on the findings of this study.