Measuring energy inefficiency with undesirable outputs and technology heterogeneity in Chinese cities
Ye Hang,
Jiasen Sun,
Qunwei Wang (),
Zengyao Zhao and
Yizhong Wang
Economic Modelling, 2015, vol. 49, issue C, 46-52
Abstract:
Energy consumption promotes rapid economic development, but also leads to increased environmental pollution. As such, energy, the economy, and the environment should all be considered when evaluating energy efficiency. This paper constructs an energy inefficiency index and discusses sources of energy inefficiency, simultaneously considering the heterogeneity of production technology, non-radial slacks, and undesirable outputs. The paper presents three major findings from an empirical study across 209 Chinese cities. First, the energy inefficiency index established in this paper provides potential ways to reduce energy intensity. Energy inefficiency is negatively correlated with economic development; the efficiency improvement potential is approximately 30%. Second, technology gaps and managerial inefficiency are the two main sources of energy inefficiency, accounting for 58% and 42% of the inefficiency, respectively. Third, the production frontier of high income cities is closest to the best production frontier. The technology gap of energy inefficiency in middle income cities is significantly smaller than cities with different incomes. Based on the empirical findings, cities were divided into four different categories, facilitating strategic policy analysis.
Keywords: Energy inefficiency; Undesirable output; Meta-frontier; Non-radial directional distance function (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (24) Track citations by RSS feed
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264999315000838
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecmode:v:49:y:2015:i:c:p:46-52
DOI: 10.1016/j.econmod.2015.04.001
Access Statistics for this article
Economic Modelling is currently edited by S. Hall and P. Pauly
More articles in Economic Modelling from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().