Empirical Analysis Of Factors Influencing The Development Of Coal Industry In Shanxi Province

As one of the most important coal-producing provinces in China, Shanxi coal industry’s development is significant to both China coal industry and Shanxi’s economic development. Shanxi produces about a quarter of total coal output in the whole country and contributes almost60%of Shanxi’s industrial added value, which indicates the importance of researching on the main factors influencing the development of Shanxi coal industry. In2008, China’s largest coal resource integration reform took place in Shanxi. As one of the leading influencing factors of Shanxi coal industry, the reform’s impact is quite essential to the industry.What are the significant factors that are affecting Shanxi coal industry? How does the key factors impact the industry? Whether does the coal resource integration reform significantly change the overall structure of Shanxi coal industry? These questions are crucial to the development of the industry and policy makers, which is also what the thesis is focused on.Existing papers studying Shanxi coal industry are mainly qualitative analysis, thus quantitative analysis using econometric methods are relatively rare. With rigorous econometric argument, the objective of this article is to search the key factors influencing the development of Shanxi coal industry, as well as testing the significance of coal resource integration reform’s impact.The thesis includes six chapters. First chapter is a brief introduction of the background, objective and structure. Second part is a summary of existing relevant studies. Third part introduces related basis of economic theory. Fourth chapter elaborates the development of Shanxi coal industry. Fifth is the empirical part, which is analyzed by using the quarterly data from2001to2012. In this part, the article chooses the coal output as the explained variable, and the analysis concludes that the key factors are capital stock, number of employees,coal mines and the out-transported amount. Also, Shanxi coal output is highly dependent on the out-transported amount and hardly responds to the changes of price. Based on previous analysis, the sixth chapter illustrates advice on policy-making.Since existing studies are mainly focused on the qualitative aspects, the main features of this paper is the use of econometric modeling methods based on factual data. On the one hand, key factors influencing the industry are affirmed, on the other hand, the effectiveness of the coal resource integration reform is tested.There are some shortcomings as well. With the limitation of data acquisition, the pretreatment of some variables may cause their variance smaller than the actual situation, therefore intensify the significance of coefficients. Meanwhile, the regression of the after-reform situation is merely a reference due to the lack of sample capacity.