Drivers and Policy Choices of Industrial Total-Factor Coal Productivity: Evidence From Eastern China

Abstract

Identifying the critical factors of industrial total-factor coal productivity (TCP) and its promotion paths will help achieve the goals of regional energy conservation and pollution reduction. Based on the perspective of total-factor productivity, this paper integrates the methods of stochastic frontier analysis (SFA), Kaya identity, and STIRPAT model to systematically diagnose the temporal and spatial characteristics and the heterogeneous sources of the industrial TCP in 11 provinces of eastern China, and it proposes some differentiated regulatory policies for different provinces. The results show that the TCP is increasing year by year and tends to converge, which indicates that increasing TCP is more and more challenging. Further research shows that there are significant spatial differences in the impact of the economic development level (EDL), industrial economic structure (IES), energy consumption intensity (ECI), and energy consumption structure (ECS) on industrial TCP. As the original driving factors of technological progress, the impact of R&D investment intensity (RII) and R&D investment levels (RIL) on industrial TCP is relatively consistent in different regions. The former has a negative congestion effect on TCP due to the imbalance of R&D investment structure, while the latter has a positive effect on TCP. Therefore, the eastern region should increase R&D expenditure and optimize R&D expenditure structure as a general way to improve TCP in each region and adopt differentiated regulatory policies in economic development and energy utilization according to local conditions.