Comparative analysis of drivers of energy consumption in China, the USA and India - A perspective from stratified heterogeneity

Qiang Wang; Xue-Ting Jiang; Xue Yang; Shuting Ge

doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.134117

Comparative analysis of drivers of energy consumption in China, the USA and India - A perspective from stratified heterogeneity

Sci Total Environ. 2020 Jan 1:698:134117. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.134117. Epub 2019 Aug 29.

Authors

Qiang Wang¹, Xue-Ting Jiang², Xue Yang³, Shuting Ge³

Affiliations

¹ School of Economics and Management, China University of Petroleum (East China), Qingdao, Shandong 266580, People's Republic of China; Institute for Energy Economics and Policy, China University of Petroleum (East China), Qingdao, Shandong 266580, People's Republic of China. Electronic address: wangqiang7@upc.edu.cn.
² School of Economics and Management, China University of Petroleum (East China), Qingdao, Shandong 266580, People's Republic of China; Institute for Energy Economics and Policy, China University of Petroleum (East China), Qingdao, Shandong 266580, People's Republic of China; State Key Laboratory of Desert and Oasis Ecology, Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Urumqi 830011, People's Republic of China; CAS Research Center for Ecology and Environment of Central Asia, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Urumqi 830011, People's Republic of China; College of Resources and Environment, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, People's Republic of China.
³ School of Economics and Management, China University of Petroleum (East China), Qingdao, Shandong 266580, People's Republic of China; Institute for Energy Economics and Policy, China University of Petroleum (East China), Qingdao, Shandong 266580, People's Republic of China.

PMID: 31518783
DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.134117

Abstract

With the limited amount of resources, developing effective strategies to make full use of them and decrease the energy consumption without too much sacrifice of economic output requires identifying key drivers of energy consumption growth rate as a prerequisite. Meanwhile, as top three consumers of primary energy of the world, China, the United States of America, and India burn over 45% of global fuels in 2016. Conducting an empirically comparative analysis of them can also set up pilot scheme for other economies to develop more efficient strategies for energy consumption. The paper modified the original Geographical Detector model with a different sampling method to detect the key driver of energy consumption growth rate, which filling the gap that there are possible interactions of potential factors. The results show that coal intensity is the biggest driver to change overall energy consumption growth rate in China and India. In comparison, for the United States, the leading drivers of energy use are the factors of individual incomes and oil intensity. In addition, all factors have interactions and enhance each other when influencing total energy consumption growth rate. India has the strongest factor interactions when influencing the energy consumption growth rate among the three economies, all interactions between factors in US is not significant as those in China and India. Besides providing outcomes that can contribute towards developing new strategies to use energy more efficiently, this research offers a pilot example of analyzing energy issues from the perspective of stratified heterogeneity in consideration the characteristic differences of each factor.

Keywords: China; Energy consumption; Geographical detector; India; Stratified heterogeneity; US.