Energy Efficiency and Energy Conservation in China’s Transportation Industry: A Three-stage Data Envelopment Analysis Approach
2019
Cheng Zhang and Zhaoyu Yu
China’s transportation industry holds high energy consumption. The energy consumption of China’s transportation industry climbs up gradually with progress in urbanization and growing volume of passenger and freight traffic, which causes heavy environmental pollution. Improving energy efficiency is an important factor and management goal that influences the sustainable development of the transportation industry. In this study, an energy efficiency evaluation system of transportation industry was initially constructed, and the three-stage data envelopment analysis (DEA) model was adopted to estimate the energy efficiency of China’s transportation industry during 2001-2016. Subsequently, environmental variables were introduced to further perfect the calculation results. Results demonstrate that the technical efficiency (TE) of China’s transportation industry is 1 in 6 years during the study period in the traditional DEA model, reaching the technological frontier level. TE still has a large potential for improvement. The input redundancy of energy efficiency in China’s transportation industry may increase as per capita gross domestic product increases. However, such input can be effectively decreased by increasing the total export-import volume and total retail sales of consumer goods. After eliminating environmental and random factors, the low energy efficiency of China’s transportation industry is mainly caused by scale inefficiency. Conclusions in this study can provide theoretical references to understand and improve the energy efficiency of the transportation industry and thus formulate effective transportation energy and environmental policies.
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