Research on Economic Effects of Energy Consumption Scale, Structure and Efficiency in China: Spatial Econometric Analysis at Provincial Scale

The exploration of economic effects of energy consumption scale, structure, and efficiency is instructive to the optimization and adjustment of energy policies, as well as the promotion of sustainable development. Existing studies seldom take the economic effects of energy consumption scale, structure, and efficiency into consideration at once. Most of them ignore the spatial dependence between energy consumption and economic growth. This paper explores the spatial agglomeration and spatial dependence of China’s provincial energy consumption scale, structure, and efficiency on economic growth from 2000 to 2017 through the spatial econometric analysis method. The study found that there are no spatial agglomeration characteristics between China’s economic level and energy consumption scale. But economic level showed negative spatial agglomerations with energy structure and positive spatial agglomerations with consumption efficiency, respectively. The expansion of energy consumption scales can promote local economic growth, but it has greater restrictive effects on the economic growth of adjacent regions. The increasing proportion of clean energy consumption can promote the economic growth of neighboring regions with positive spatial spillover effects, and the improvement of energy efficiency can enhance the economic growth in both local and adjacent regions.