An Assessment of China's Energy Consumption Intensity based on Structure Share and Efficiency Share Methods

Energy shortage has become the bottleneck of economic development in China.It is of great significance for construction of economical society and sustainable development of country's economy to illustrate the mechanism and change trend of energy consumption and economic development.Since 1985,the energy utilization efficiency in China has been greatly increased,but compared with the developed countries,there is still big room to reduce the energy consumption.In this paper,we divide the change of energy consumption intensity into structure share and efficiency share and put forward their formulation,then use the statistical data from 1985 to 2003 to calculate the structure share and efficiency share in the change of energy consumption intensity,analyze the impact of economic structure adjustment and efficiency improvement on it.The result shown that the development of industrial structure and increasing of energy utilization efficiency were two major factors which could promote the decrease of the energy consumption intensity.The cumulative rate of structure share contribution is-0.08%,the cumulative rate of efficiency share contribution is 100.08%.Therefore, it is concluded that the efficiency share is the major factor to affect energy consumption intensity and the structure share is playing a negative role in the decrease of energy consumption intensity.Moreover,the impact of efficiency share on energy consumption intensity is consistent,while the impact of structure share on energy consumption seems to be inconsistent because of the impact of the macroeconomic policy at the same time.The ratio of efficiency share of the second industry to the total is the biggest and beyond 80 percent,and first industry and the tertiary industry has the relatively smaller ratio.Also the ratio of structure share of the second industry is the biggest,accounting for 68 percent.So we can conclude that the increase of the energy utilization efficiency in the second industry predominantly led the fall of whole energy consumption intensity.The increase of the energy utilization efficiency in the second industry not only decreases the effect of the other industry to fluctuation of the energy consumption,but also promotes gradually the decrease of the energy consumption intensity.Therefore,the research relating to the energy consumption should focus on decreasing energy intensity in the second industry and improving energy utilization efficiency.