Research Of Energy Efficiency And Differences In Regional Economic Growth

The research path of this article is that on the framework of the total production factors we use the stochastic frontier analysis method (SFA) to measure regional energy efficiencies and analyse their convergence, based on the result of regional energy efficiencies, we build a panel threshold regression model of the regional economic growth, to prove that the differences in regional energy efficiency is the sources of heterogeneous regional economic growth. The Main content is in the third and fourth chapter, in the third chapter firstly based on the Cobb-Douglas production function we theoretically decompose the factors of regional energy efficiency, and on this base build stochastic frontier production function model, using the panel data between 2000-2009 years of 29 provinces, to measure the energy efficiency of the regions, and further analyse the convergence of regional energy efficiencies. SFA analysis shows that:Now, economic growth in all regions of China shows that returns to scale is increasing, high energy price hinders economic growth, the main driving force of promoting rapid economic growth comes from capital investment, followed by energy and labor; the increase in regional non-energy factor productivity mainly depends on improvement of the regional system level, secondly by progress in cutting-edge technology; energy efficiency in China's provincial-level region in general has shown a steady increase in 2000-2009, in addition to 2009 the world financial crisis hits most of the provinces downward in energy efficiency. The result of absolute convergence analysis as follows:it's exist ofσabsolute convergence of energy efficiency in our country, but the four major economic zones have differentσconvergence within energy efficiency inside; theβconvergence rate of the energy efficiency in the west to the east's is accelerating, mainly due to the labor-energy ratio in the west has been reduced, the level of regional system to narrow the gap with the east, and energy prices in the west has been higher than the average of the east.In the forth chapter, on the base of the Cobb-Douglas production function model, we set the panel threshold regression model of the regional economic growth(PTR), using the panel data of our 29 provinces between 2000-2009 years, test and estimate the nonlinear relationship between the regional gross domestic product(GDP), capital, labor and energy elements under the constraints of the energy efficiency. The results show that:either homogeneous or heterogeneous in parameter assumptions, the production factors contribute to regional economic growth, and they are positive; At the same time, under the assumption of parameter heterogeneity the play of energy for regional economic growth is significant non-linear characteristics, there are three threshold in the energy efficiency, to turn our 29 provinces into four divisions of the low, medium, high and ultra high energy efficiency area; with the improvement of energy efficiency, the energy's contribution to the regional economy growth is gradually improved, and we estimate the energy's contribution to economic growth in all areas of different energy efficiency levels.