中国煤炭消费与影响因素动态关系的实证分析——兼论煤炭消费的非对称价格效应

An Empirical Analysis on the Dynamic Relationships between Coal Consumption and Its Influential Factors in China:Asymmetric Effects of Price on Coal Consumption

本文在建立我国煤炭消费协整方程的基础上,利用状态空间模型技术进一步建立了我国煤炭消费的变参数模型,对1978年-2007年间我国煤炭消费与经济增长及其它影响因素之间的相关关系进行了动态分析,以揭示我国煤炭消费与经济增长相关关系的时变规律。本文在实证分析中不仅考虑了经济增长、产业结构、技术改造、煤炭价格及运输成本对我国煤炭消费的影响,而且还借鉴了Gately(1992)开发的技术,对我国煤炭消费变动的非对称价格效应进行了实证分析。实证分析结果表明经济的持续增长和重工业比重的增加是拉动煤炭消费增长的主要原因,并且经济增长的拉动作用正在逐步减弱,而产业结构特别是工业结构对煤炭消费的影响作用逐步增强。煤炭价格对煤炭消费存在显著的非对称效应,但煤炭消费对煤炭价格变动的敏感性显著弱于运输成本,并且差距呈逐步增加态势。

Rapid growth of economy can frequently lead to a rapid increase in energy consumption. Rapidly consuming energy would, however, cause a series of problems with respect to atmospheric pollution, environmental degradation, and ecological degeneration. Since the 21st century, issues related to energy have received increasingly more attention in the scientific community. Since coal has accounted for about 75 percent of China’s total energy output and consumption, it is especially important to examine influential factors affecting coal consumption and the dynamic relationships between the coal consumption and those influential factors. By using the co-integrating technique, the author investigated the long run equilibrium in China’s coal consumption based on statistical data of years 1978-2007. It was found that there exists a long-term equilibrium relationship among economic growth, the proportion of heavy industry, technology input, coal price, transport cost and China’s coal consumption. The author subsequently proposed a time-varying parameter model depicting variations in coal consumption of China and analyzed the dynamic relationships between coal consumption and influential factors in an attempt to reveal a temporal variation rule of the relationships between coal consumption and economic growth of China during the period 1978-2007. Results showed that continually increased China’s GDP and the proportion of the heavy industry contributed primarily to the rapidly increasing coal consumption in China. Between 1978 and 2007, the coal consumption flexibility of economic growth was decreasing, but the coal consumption flexibility of the industrial structure showed generally an increasing trend. Although the coal consumption flexibility of coal price was declining, the coal consumption flexibility of transport cost was increasing significantly between 1978 and 2007. In addition, the technology input elasticity of coal consumption was essentially small, but showed an increasing trend since 1978. Using Gately’s techniques to investigate asymmetric effects of price on coal consumption of China, it was drawn that the asymmetric influence of coal price on coal consumption was considerable in China, whereas the coal consumption flexibility of coal price was weaker than that of transport cost. It is suggested that the key for reducing the coal consumption flexibility involves： 1） reducing the proportion of high coal consumption industries to speed up the industrial construction adjustment; 2） promoting marketing reform of coal price forward to make full use of the basic resources allocation role of the market mechanism; and 3） increasing technology input to raise coal use efficiency.