Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
BAU Scenario
In a long term, investment and improvement in productivity and changes in labor
supply determine the overall economic growth situation. Labor supply depends on
the total amount and age structure of population. Population age structure and
changes of total labor numbers have significant effects on the labor force immi-
gration. Population growth is impacted by several factors, such as family planning
policy, improvement of people's living standards, lifestyle changes, among which
national population policy is the major influencing factor. In this study, population
growth is exogenous variable, and population forecast is from the Institute of
Population and Labor Economics. According to this forecast, China's population
will peak in 2037 with approximate 1.47 billion, while the peak of working-age
population will occur in 2017-2027 with about 10 million. According to the
proportion of labor forces to the working-age population labor in 2006, the total
labor resources in the whole country will be about 820 million at the moment when
the working-age population is in the peak, and it will increase by 40 million in
comparison to 2006.
Productivity improvement is mainly reflected as the changes of total factor
productivity (TFP) in the model. Through studies on TFP in the past 30 years, we
found that there are amounts of factors affecting TFP in China, such as institutional
reform, human capital spillover effect, technological capital, market reform,
urbanization, foreign investment effect, foreign trade effect, infrastructure and
administrative costs, and final consumption rate. Although previous quantitative
research produced different results, most of the studies show that the average
annual growth rate of TFP in China is between 2 and 4 %. In a long run, some
significant factors of promoting TFP growth will continue to play an important
role, for example, reform will be further deepened, urbanization will be steadily
pushed forward, rural labor force will continue to be migrated, and human capital
will be accumulated. Therefore, in BAU scenario, model assumes that the average
annual growth rate of TFP continues to follow the development ratio in the past
during 2008-2050, and remain at the level of about 2 %.
China's demand for energy has surged to fuel its rapidly expanding industrial
and commercial sectors as well as households experiencing rising living standards.
Previous studies indicated that average energy consumption has risen by 5.2 %
since 1978, while during 2001-2007, the primary energy consumption has soared
through an average annual increase of 9.8 %, and the GDP has increased by
10.2 % in the same period (Liu et al.
2011
). Previous studies also showed that
from 1999 to 2008, the average growth rate of coal production in China was
11.37 %, which was almost twice as much as that of 5.81 % from 1982 to 1996. In
2008, coal production in China rose to 2716 million tons (40 % of global coal
production) (Lin and Liu
2010
). Moreover, integrated modeling that considering
the factors of population growth, economic growth and industrial structure chan-
ges, technological advance, environmental impact and energy security estimated
that in 2050 primary energy demand will reach 3,440-4,150 Mtce. The structure of
energy get improved significantly, and the proportion of coal in primary energy
