Dynamic Energy Efficiency, Energy Decoupling Rate, and Decarbonization: Evidence from ASEAN+6

Abstract

Improving energy efficiency is widely identified as shifting energy usage to an optimal status in order to ultimately strengthen a country’s competitiveness and development, and indeed this is of particular relevance to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations plus Six’ (ASEAN+6). The traditional data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach has extensively been employed for estimating energy efficiency, but it does not properly utilize the weight in the DEA model to probe the behavior change of a decision making unit (DMU). This research therefore applies a progressive time-weighted dynamic efficiency model (PTDEM) to estimate the energy efficiency of ASEAN+6 and discusses the issues concerning their energy decoupling rates and decarbonization. The proposed model herein fully considers a DMU’s behavior change by estimating its energy efficiency. Empirical results reveal that: (i) improvements in energy efficiency within ASEAN are greater than in the other six countries; (ii) members of ASEAN still have more room for improvement than the other six countries with regard to achieving the standard ratio of the energy decoupling rate; and (iii) there is no evidence of convergence to decarbonization within ASEAN+6.

Collections for Economic Growth, Social Development, and Technological Innovation Under Climate Change

“…The second paper by Chen et al (2021) demonstrates that the improvement of energy efficiency is crucial to strengthen a country's competitiveness and development, and then uses the data from Association of Southeast Asian Nations plus Six' (ASEAN+6) to illustrate how an optimal status of energy use would benefit. This study firstly discusses the strengths and weakness of the data envelopment analysis (DEA) and presents how incorporation of a decision-making unit into a progressive time-weighted dynamic efficiency model could be used to estimate energy efficiency, energy decoupling rates, and decarbonization.…”