The Impact Of Economic Openness On Energy Efficiency

Development of economy results in the rapid growth of energy consumption, and the energy gap has been more and more serious. Huge and growing energy needs make China depend heavily on the foreign energy that does harm to the sustainability of our economic and social development. Improvement of energy efficiency is one of the best solutions. The paper focuses on the influence of openness on energy efficiency.At first, the impact of openness on energy efficiency is analyzed from scale effect, technology effect and structure effect. Then compare and analyze the energy consumption from a global perspective. What’s more, the analysis of the correlation between energy efficiency and economic openness shows that there is a significantly positive relationship between them.Then, the paper makes two empirical studies based on the date of different countries and Chinese provinces. The first one with the threshold panel model shows: as far as the impact of openness on energy efficiency, there are three threshold values, which are $915, $7,209 and $24,253; All of the impacts are positive significantly. However, the impact will decrease constantly with the increase of income until it exceeds $ 24,253; Chinese level of income got past the second threshold value($ 7,209) in 2014. The results of Chinese provinces show that: openness improves China’s energy efficiency significantly, but the impact of each region varies, the east region has positive and significant influence, the middle region has no remarkable influence, and the west region has obvious passive impact.At last, the paper puts forward some suggestions of improving the energy efficiency.