Pollution heterogeneity-based analysis on influences of research and development (R&D) subsidy on energy consumption and energy structure in the Chinese industrial sector

Abstract

Based on the data on the Chinese industrial sector in 2009~2015, this paper empirically analyses the effect of research and development (R&D) subsidy on energy consumption and energy structure of the industry in China. The research results show that the R&D subsidy slowed down the growth of the total energy consumption in the Chinese industrial sector and promoted the optimization of the energy structure in the short term. On this basis, the author investigated how these impacts varied within so called pollution departments. The investigation reveals a significant impact of R&D subsidy in high-pollution departments: the subsidy greatly suppressed the energy consumption and optimized the energy structure of these departments; for low-pollution departments, the R&D subsidy had no major impacts on energy consumption or energy structure.