رابطه بین توسعه اقتصادی چین و مصرف انرژی در دوره های مختلف

Since the 1980s, Chinese economy grew rapidly. With the rapid economic growth, Chinese energy consumption sharply increased. The relation between Chinese energy consumption and economic growth is focused on, and many researchers have studied this issue by applying the methods such as granger causality test. However, the results just reveal the relation in a very long period. In this paper, the history of Chinese economy is divided into four periods. And the relation between Chinese energy consumption and economic growth is examined by applying grey incidence analysis, which is one of the most important methods of grey system theory which can be applied to solve the problems with small samples. The results show that the relations in different periods are not the same. The degree of grey incidences between total energy consumption and values added of secondary industry is larger, and the degree of grey incidences between GDP and consumption of coal is larger too. And the policy implications of these results are explained.

China is one of the fastest growing economies in the world with an average annual GDP growth rate about 10%. In 2008, China was the third largest economy in the world just behind the United States and Japan with a nominal GDP of US $ 4.6 trillion measured in exchange-rate terms. Chinese foreign trade has grown faster than its GDP for the past 25 years. As its role in world trade has steadily grown, its importance to the international economy has also increased. Chinese energy consumption has quickly expanded as well. Nowadays China is the world’s second largest energy consumer only behind the United States. In 2006, China was the world’s third largest net importer of oil while it was a net oil exporter in the early 1990s. China will increase natural gas imports via pipeline and liquefied natural gas too. And China is also the world’s largest producer and consumer of coal. China is becoming more and more influential in world energy market. The recent global financial crisis has slowed down Chinese economic growth. On November 9, 2008, the four-trillion-Yuan ($586 billion) economic stimulus package launched in China. National Development and Reform Committee (NDRC), the country’s top economic planner, announced that the central stimulus package was roughly divided into seven parts, with 1.5 trillion Yuan going towards large-scale infrastructure projects such as railways, roads, airports and the national grid; areas most affected by the May 12 earthquake in the southwestern Sichuan Province will get 1 trillion Yuan for reconstruction; the rest of the stimulus money will be spent on affordable housing, rural welfare and infrastructure, medical and cultural development, environmental protection and industrial restructuring. The fiscal stimulus will lead to economic development in the second half of 2009 and 2010. China had been the world’s largest exporter by 2009. Urbanization in China and technological progress lag behind the developed countries. It will cost several decades for China to catch up with the developed countries. So there is ample amount of potential for China to maintain relatively fast economic growth in the medium term. Will Chinese energy consumption increase as fast as economic growth or not? The relation between Chinese economic growth and energy consumption should be researched.

Some researchers found the unidirectional granger causality running from economic growth to energy consumption and thought that energy conservation will not affect economic growth. However, it is found that the relations between Chinese energy consumption and economic growth in different periods are not the same from the grey incidence analysis. The relation between energy consumption and economic growth in the future would be not be the same as those in the past. It is very important to the policy-makers. The effect on economic growth of energy conservation cannot be simply judged by the relation between energy consumption and economic growth in the past. Some energy-saving policies maybe will slow down economic growth. The degrees of grey incidences between values added of secondary industry and total energy consumption are much larger. Nowadays, secondary industry consumes about 50% of the total energy consumption. Therefore, it is very important to improve the energy efficiency of secondary industry for Chinese energy conservation.