Does energy efficiency increase at the expense of output performance: Evidence from manufacturing firms in Jiangsu province, China

Lei Jiang, Haifeng Zhou and Shixiong He

Energy, 2021, vol. 220, issue C

Abstract: To mitigate environmental pollution and reduce energy wastes, the Chinese central government has launched a quantitative and binding energy efficiency improvement target since the 11th Five-year-plan. Specific targets were assigned to manufacturing firms since the manufacturing industry is the largest energy user and pollutant emitter. Thus, it is of great significance for manufacturing firms that energy efficiency is improved, however, without impairing output performance. Thus, we first applied an undesirable-output-based data envelopment analysis method to evaluate the energy efficiency and the output efficiency of 269 textile and chemical firms, and then used regression models to investigate the interaction between energy efficiency and output efficiency. We find that in the case of textile firms, energy efficiency is positively correlated with output efficiency. Conversely, textile firms with high output performance usually have high energy efficiency scores. In other words, textile firms can deal with a good trade-off between energy efficiency and output efficiency. Besides, we observe that increases in tax and operating expenses for textile firms impair output and energy efficiency. Moreover, larger firms benefiting from economies of scale have higher output and energy efficiency scores. In contrast, in the case of energy-intensive chemical firms, no such trade-off is found.

Keywords: Energy efficiency; Output efficiency; Data envelopment analysis; Undesirable output; Jiangsu province; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:220:y:2021:i:c:s0360544220328115

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2020.119704

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