Mechanism of Energy Efficiency Response to Industrial Restructuring and Energy Consumption Structure Change

With the economic development of the human society, growth of population, and accelerated urbanization and industrialization, increase of asymmetric carbon cycle and global climate change caused by rapid growth of energy consumption are becoming the current hot spots of all walks of life worldwide. Therefore, improving energy efficiency has become an effective way of active response to energy saving and realization of sustainable development. This paper, by analyzing the characteristics of energy efficiency, industrial structure and energy consumption structure of China and five other developed countries, establishes a VAR model and uses impulse responses function and variance decomposition methods to reveal the mechanism of energy efficiency response to industrial structure evolvement and energy consumption structure change. Research suggests that in the last 40 years, China's tertiary industry has played a greater role than its secondary industry in improving energy efficiency. Although the development of the secondary industry has a positively weak correlation with energy efficiency, according to the experience of developed countries, the inhibition of secondary industry on the energy efficiency improvement has not yet appeared in China, which indicates that the economy still needs pushing by industry with extensive and high energy consumption. Otherwise, the energy consumption relies on coal, which also has the inhibition on the energy efficiency improving. In the end, basing on such analysis, the paper discusses the response of energy efficiency to industrial restructuring and energy consumption structure change. Some conclusions can be drawn as follows: (1) Compared with developed countries, the industrial restructuring has inhibition on energy efficiency improvement in the short term until the mid-term, then the positive impact of industrial restructuring will emerge, which will improve energy efficiency. (2) Since existence of coal-based energy consumption structure for a long time, its negative effect appeared later in China than in developed countries, and the evolution of energy consumption structure in both China and developed countries has little effect on energy efficiency. (3) The influence of industrial structure change is greater than the evolution of energy consumption structure, so the impact of industrial restructuring and upgrading is the key to improve energy efficiency and carry out energy saving policies.