Study on the Threshold Effect of Urbanization on Energy Consumption

Abstract

Energy is an important material impetus for urbanization, while urbanization is also key factors that stimulate the energy consumption increase. The rapid development of China’s urbanization in recent years has led to changes in the total energy consumption and structure, which will inevitably affect the realization of China’s rapid and sustainable economic development goals. Therefore, this article was based on panel data from 2005 to 2016 of 30 provinces in China, used energy consumption as the explained variable, the urbanization rate as the core variable, GDP per capita as threshold variables, and selected GDP per capita, industrialization level, urban per capita disposable income, the density of urban population, the proportion of the tertiary industry as control variables. Meanwhile, the threshold model was used to study the threshold effect. We put focus on the nonlinear relationship between urbanization and energy consumption and the corresponding regional differences and hope to make reasonable suggestions for optimizing the industrial structure and finally realizing the coordinated development of urbanization and energy consumption in China. The results show that in the accelerated stage of economic development, the main impact of urbanization is to accelerate the increase of energy consumption. When the level of economic development enters the post-industrialization stage, the stimulation of urbanization on energy consumption becomes smaller, which means that the urbanization transformation will face great pressure on energy consumption. Therefore, this paper considered China in three areas, eastern, middle and western areas to transversely compare and analyze, and put forward three rationalization proposals: To speed up the marketization of construction, promote economic development of the western and middle region, and narrow the gap of urbanization development of areas; to coordinate urbanization development and energy consumption in the eastern and western regions, accelerate industrial restructure in the middle and western regions, and promote sound and rapid urbanization; to grasp the law of urbanization’s effect on energy consumption and control the trend of energy consumption.