An Empirical Study on the Impact of Administrative Monopoly Power Price on Local Energy Efficiency

AbstractEnergy efficiency in China has a great gap with developed countries. Even among different regions in China, energy efficiency has huge differences. This paper investigates the impact of administrative monopoly power price on regional energy efficiency. Based on the analysis of its conduct mechanism, the empirical section data of various provinces in China in 2006 are used to check the hypothesis of this paper. The finding is that the huge difference in administrative monopoly power price among regions is an important factor impacting energy efficiency, the higher the administrative monopoly power price, the higher the energy efficiency .The artificial inter-provincial barrier in power market and administrative monopoly power price hinders the circulation of power resources among different regions so that there is no efficient allocation of resources all over the country. Besides, it is hard to rectify low allocation efficiency by relying on market force. Regional protectionism and inter-provincial barriers of the power market should be broken to form uniform national power market so that energy efficiency can be enhanced and huge energy saving potentials can be released© 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and peer-review under responsibility of RIUD