Official Tenure And Energy Intensity Change

China’s resource consumption has risen sharply with the rapid economic growth.In order to improve the serious energy-consuming situation,the Chinese central government included energy-saving targets into officials’ performance evaluation which previously used GDP growth as a single indicator in the year of 2006.This paper focuses on three questions:after the year of 2006,whether local government officials have an impact on the energy intensity?Whether the impact is different in the different ages of tenure?And in regions with different energy intensity,are there differences in the impacts?To solve these three problem is of great practical significance for giving full play to the guiding role of local officials in terms of energy efficiency.This paper uses panel data matching officials in office for n years with the n-year energy intensity change index of 279 prefecture-level cities in China during the period of 2006 to 2017.The main conclusions of this paper are:After the energy-saving target responsibility system was gradually established in 2006,local government officials had an impact on the decline in energy intensity within their jurisdiction.In the early stage of the official’s term,this effect was not significant,but with the tenure increasing,the effect appears and increases as tenure increases.Officials in high energy-consuming regions have a stronger political incentive to conduct energy-saving behaviors,thus have a significantly higher leading effect on energy intensity decline than medium and low energy-consuming regions.This paper also provides a possible mechanism:local officials will use their administrative power to impose more energy-saving pressure on state-owned enterprises within their jurisdiction,especially in the late stage of the term.