| 摘要 | ��
1. Research Purpose
Korea has been ranked in the tenth place for energy consumption and the seventh for petroleum consumption in the world. The annual growth rate of Korean economy was about 5.7% for the last two decades. On the other hand, the elasticity of energy consumption to gross domestic products has been 1.16 since the 1990s, which implies that the trend of energy consumption is higher than that of economic growth.
Korea imports most of energy from abroad. The energy imports of Korea was about 49.6 billion dollars in 2004, which accounted for 22% of total imports of Korea. Considering the situation of poor energy resources in Korea, the improvement of energy use efficiency is absolutely necessary.
The Korean government plans to extend financial supports for the development of energy conservation technology, clean energy technology, and resource technology. At present, system of volunteer agreement (VA), energy service company (ESCO), energy saving through partnership (ESP) have been major tools to drive the participation of individuals and firms in energy savings. Especially, under the condition of high oil price we need to find a way to maximize the economic effect of the support fund of energy conservation
Thus, this study tries to analyze the economic performances of energy saving investment through the analysis of energy intensity. However, due to the limit of data, this paper uses energy saving investment, which is including the Korean government's supports, in the analyses of the relationship between energy saving investment and energy intensity.
2. Summary
The purpose of this paper is to analyze empirically the economic effect of energy saving investment on the improvement of energy intensity. Energy intensity is defined by the ratio of energy consumption (in terms of oil equivalent) to value added (million Korean won). If this ratio declines, then we could say that energy efficiency is improved. Thus if energy saving investment contributes to the decrease in the ratio, then these variables has a negative relationship and the investment in energy savings has an economic performance.
The data used in empirical analysis are panel data, both time-series and cross-section data. Thus the methodology applied to is also a technique for panel data. That is, fixed effect and random effect models are used. The F test and Hausman test will be used in the choice of appropriate one from these two models. Further more, manufacturing sectors have been divided by large energy consuming and non-large energy consuming ones. Chow test has been applied to for the validity of division of manufacturing sector into two groups.
The objective of analysis in the research is manufacturing industrial sector, which has nine sectors and the time period of analysis is from 1982 to 2004. The eight sectors, excluding other manufacturing sector, are as follows: Pulp and printing, petroleum products and chemicals, non-metallic mineral products, and basic metals (which are large energy consuming sectors) and food and tobacco, textiles and apparel, wood products, and fabricated metal products (which are non-large energy consuming sectors).
3. Research Results & Policy Suggestions
As mentioned above, the purpose of the paper is to analyze the effect of energy saving investment and rationalization investment of manufacturing sector on energy consumption.
According to the empirical results, firstly, energy saving investment has a negative relationship with energy intensity, however, its effect is not high in terms of absolute volume of energy consuming.
Secondly, in improving energy intensity of energy saving investment, its elasticity is higher in non-large energy consuming sector compared it with large energy consuming sector.
Thirdly, the investment of maintenance and repair of existing facilities and automation are also playing an important role in energy conservation. Thus, careful approaches are recommended in evaluating efficiency of investment in energy saving. On the basis of the empirical results, the elasticities of rationalization investment and automation investment (excluding energy saving investment from rationalization investment) to energy intensity are larger than those of energy saving investment. In terms of the reduction of green house gas per investment unit cost, however, energy saving investment has larger effect than rationalization investment.
Only two variables are considered in this study. Thus, future study should consider more various empirical techniques such as time-series method through data management and collection for the objective tests of this study.
77 pages., 18 refs., 13 figs., 24 tabs. |
