Why Did the Energy Intensity Fall in China's Industrial Sector in the 1990s? The Relative Importance of Structural Change and Intensity Change

22 Pages Posted: 8 May 2001

See all articles by ZhongXiang Zhang

ZhongXiang Zhang

Tianjin University - Ma Yinchu School of Economics

Multiple version iconThere are 2 versions of this paper

Date Written: January 2003

Abstract

There have been a variety of studies investigating the relative importance of structural change and real intensity change to the change in China's energy consumption in the 1980s. However, no detailed analysis to date has been done to examine whether or not the increased energy efficiency trend in the 1980s still prevails in the 1990s. This article has filled this gap by investigating the change in energy consumption in China's industrial sector in the 1990s, based on the data sets of value added and end-use energy consumption for the 29 industrial subsectors and using the newly proposed decomposition method of giving no residual. Our results clearly show that the overwhelming contributor to the decline in industrial energy use in the 1990s was the decline in real energy intensity, indicating that the trend of real energy intensity declines in the 1980s at the 2-digit level was still maintained in the 1990s. This conclusion still holds even if we lower the growth rate dramatically in line with the belief that the growth rate of China's GDP is overestimated.

Keywords: China, energy, structural change, energy intensity change

JEL Classification: Q43, Q48

Suggested Citation

Zhang, ZhongXiang, Why Did the Energy Intensity Fall in China's Industrial Sector in the 1990s? The Relative Importance of Structural Change and Intensity Change (January 2003). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=267993 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.267993

ZhongXiang Zhang (Contact Author)

Tianjin University - Ma Yinchu School of Economics ( email )

92 Weijin Road, Nankai District
Tianjin 300072
China
+86 22 87370560 (Phone)

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