The Impact of Marine Economic Development on Energy Efficiency: The Case of Zhoushan Archipelago New Area in China

Abstract

In recent years, the Chinese Central Government has put great emphasis on the marine economy, since it has been a new driving force of the national economic development. Yet, the relationship between marine economic development and energy efficiency remains unknown. In this paper, we investigate whether marine economic development affected energy efficiency. We focused on the Zhoushan Archipelago, the first National New Area for marine economic development in China. We applied panel data approach to construct the counterfactual of Zhoushan Archipelago. We compared Zhoushan and its counterfactual, the synthetic Zhoushan, and viewed the difference between them, after the Zhoushan Archipelago New Area, as the impact of marine economic development on energy efficiency. We found that compared with its counterfactual, the real Zhoushan had a more substantial improvement in energy efficiency after the National New Area construction. We estimated that the construction of the National New Area for Marine Economy increased energy efficiency by about 10 percentage points. We also applied the bootstrapping technique to illustrate the significance of the estimated results. The results suggest that the Zhoushan Archipelago New Area construction had a statistically significant impact on energy efficiency. In addition, we conducted two tests, including leave-one-out tests and permutation tests, to check the robustness of estimated results, which also serve as an illustration of significance of the estimated results from an alternative empirical perspective. The results from these two tests are similar to each other, both indicating that the Zhoushan Archipelago New Area construction had a statistically significant positive impact on energy efficiency. Overall, our results suggest that marine economic development had a sizable improvement in energy efficiency.