The impact of the new energy demonstration city construction on energy consumption intensity: Exploring the sustainable potential of China's firms

Xiaoqian Liu, Chang'an Wang*, Haitao Wu, Cunyi Yang, Khaldoon Albitar*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

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Abstract

As a comprehensive energy transition reform strategy, China's new energy demonstration city (NEDC) pilot policy aims to accelerate the transformation from a fossil fuel-based energy system to a more sustainable energy system. Employing unique data on firms' energy consumption from National Tax Survey Database, this paper investigates how NEDC policy affects firms' energy utilization efficiency based on the difference-in-differences model. We observe that NEDC construction reduces firms' energy consumption intensity (ECI) in the pilot cities. After using the instrumental variable approach to deal with endogeneity problems, the conclusions still hold. The mechanism analysis reveals that the decrease in firms' ECI is driven by offering more tax incentives to enterprises and prompting them to pursue technological innovation. Heterogeneity analysis shows that this negative impact is more prominent for SOEs and high-energy-consuming enterprises; we also observe that this effect is more pronounced for firms in resource-based cities and old-industrial-based cities. Our results provide policy implications for initiating policies in other countries to improve firms' energy utilization performance.
Original languageEnglish
Article number128716
Number of pages11
JournalEnergy
Volume283
Early online date16 Aug 2023
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 15 Nov 2023

Keywords

  • Energy consumption intensity
  • Energy utilization efficiency
  • New energy demonstration city pilot policy
  • Tax incentives
  • Technological innovation

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