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The effect of telecommunication services on energy intensity in China

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Abstract

Little attention has been paid to the influence of telecommunications on energy consumption, especially from an empirical perspective in the emerging economies. This paper firstly employs an autoregressive distribution lag bound test to examine the co-integration relationship among our model variables. Then, it mainly follows a partial least squares regression to investigate the long-run effect and an error correction model to explore the short-run impact of telecommunication services on energy intensity in China. Our main conclusions reveal a co-integration relationship among all the variables in our expanded STIRPAT model. Besides, it is also indicated that the energy intensity reduction effect of telecommunication services is statistically significant both in the short and long term. Additionally, the impacts of population, income, industrial structure, energy consumption structure, and energy price on energy intensity are also examined.

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Notes

  1. The methodologies used in our paper, including ARDL-bound test, PLS, and ARDL-ECM, have great power when the number of observation samples is low.

  2. These include the fixed cost of acquiring information and the variable costs of participating in markets.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their useful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Sciences, North 4th Ring West Road, Haidian District, Beijing, China

    Dong Wang

  2. School of Software, Hebei Normal University, 20th South Second Ring Road, Yuhua District, Shijiazhuang, China

    Rui Wang

  3. School of Management and Economics, Beijing Institute of Technology, No.5, South Zhongguancun Road, Haidian District, Beijing, China

    Botang Han

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  1. Dong Wang
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Correspondence to Dong Wang.

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Wang, D., Wang, R. & Han, B. The effect of telecommunication services on energy intensity in China. Energy Efficiency 12, 653–666 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12053-018-9666-0

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