ABSTRACT
Although the existing literature has evaluated the energy rebound effect (ERE) from various aspects, the estimates of different types of ERE obtained by different methods still deserve further discussion. For this reason, by analyzing the pros and cons of assessment methods, this study offers a comparison between the direct and economy-wide EREs based on China's transportation sector during the period of 2003-2019. Specifically, on the basis of the translog cost function, we use the dynamic ordinary least square (DOLS) method with seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) to evaluate the sectoral direct ERE. Considering that the direct ERE estimation is limited by its strict assumptions, this article further assesses the sectoral ERE from a macro perspective. By constructing the dynamic two-stage panel function, the generalized method of moments (GMM) was adopted to estimate the sectoral economy-wide ERE. The empirical results demonstrate that first, capital and labor relative to energy are Morishima substitutes; second, the sectoral short-term economy-wide ERE in China was 71.60%, while the long-term economy-wide ERE was 32.00% during the study period; third, there are significant regional differences in the EREs of Chinese transportation industry both for the short and long term, and the east China demonstrated the highest sectoral economy-wide ERE.
Subject(s)
ChinaABSTRACT
As the political and technological innovation center of China, Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei urban agglomeration (BTHUA) is an important engine of national economic development. However, the BTHUA is faced with uneven industrial development and environmental pollution problems. Energy efficiency of the industrial sector, critical to energy conservation and environmental protection, is the key to achieving green economic transformation. For this reason, this study adopts the parametric meta-frontier approach to measure the industrial total-factor energy efficiency (TFEE) of the BTHUA, centering on the evaluation of regional technology gap ratio (TGR). Empirical results indicate that there are significant regional disparities of industrial TFEE in the BTHUA. In particular, industrial TFEE tends to be underestimated without considering technological heterogeneity in production technology. The TGRs of manufacturing cities, tourist cities, and the modernized metropolis (Beijing) are the highest among the region. On this basis, the influencing factors of industrial TFEE of the BTHUA are further accessed based on the fixed effects model and the Tobit model. This article verifies that the evaluation of TFEE in the BTHUA must take regional technological gap into account, and provides additional empirical evidence on how to promote coordinated regional industrial development and energy efficiency improvement.
