Wang Xuan, Lu Yonglong, Chen Chunci, Yi Xiaojie, Cui Haotian
State Key Laboratory of Urban and Regional Ecology, Research Centre for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100085, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China.
State Key Laboratory of Marine Environmental Science and Key Laboratory of the Ministry of Education for Coastal Wetland Ecosystems, College of the Environment and Ecology, Xiamen University, Fujian 361102, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China.
J Environ Sci (China). 2023 Feb 26;137:41-52. doi: 10.1016/j.jes.2023.02.031.
Improving energy efficiency is regarded as a key path to tackling global warming and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In 2020, the energy consumption of the world's ten major energy-consuming countries accounted for 66.8% of the global total. This paper applied data envelopment analysis (DEA) to calculate these ten major energy-consuming countries' total-factor energy efficiency (TFEE) at national and sectoral levels from 2001-2020, and explored the influencing factors of total-factor energy efficiency with the Tobit regression model. The results showed significant difference in the ten countries' energy efficiency. The United States and Germany topped the list for total-factor energy efficiency, while China and India were at the bottom. Meanwhile, the energy efficiency of the industrial subsector has increased significantly over the past two decades, while that of the other subsectors has been relatively flat. The industrial structure upgrading, per capita GDP, energy consumption structure, and foreign direct investment had significant impacts on energy efficiency with national heterogeneity. Energy consumption structure and GDP per capita were determinative factors of energy efficiency.
