The effect of telecommunication services on energy intensity in China

Little attention has been paid to the influence of telecommunications on energy consumption, especially from an empirical perspective in the emerging economies. This paper firstly employs an autoregressive distribution lag bound test to examine the co-integration relationship among our model variables. Then, it mainly follows a partial least squares regression to investigate the long-run effect and an error correction model to explore the short-run impact of telecommunication services on energy intensity in China. Our main conclusions reveal a co-integration relationship among all the variables in our expanded STIRPAT model. Besides, it is also indicated that the energy intensity reduction effect of telecommunication services is statistically significant both in the short and long term. Additionally, the impacts of population, income, industrial structure, energy consumption structure, and energy price on energy intensity are also examined.