Decoupling economic growth from energy consumption in top five energy consumer economies: A technological and urbanization perspective

Better digging the sustainable development path of the top five energy consumers (China, the United States, India, Japan and Russia) can serve both domestic economy and global economy to achieve coordinated development with the ever-increasing energy demand. This work has made the following efforts: (1) the Tapio decoupling model was employed to determine the decoupling states between energy consumption and economy; (2) based on the extended Kaya formula and the LMDI method, this work focused on measuring the impact of technological factors and urbanization factor on energy consumption; (3) the LMDI method and the Tapio decoupling model were combined to measure the impact degree of influencing factors on decoupling indicators. The main findings show that from 2001 to 2018: (1) Japan was the country with the most year of strong decoupling, followed by the United States, which indicates that the decoupling status of developed countries was better than that of developing countries. (2) The driving forces behind the energy consumption growth are mainly the effects of R&D scale and urbanization, while the main factors that hinder energy consumption growth were technological factors, including energy intensity effect and R&D efficiency effect. (3) Energy intensity effect was the main driving force for the decoupling process, and the R&D efficiency effect was the biggest obstacle to decoupling energy consumption from economic growth. Finally, this paper proposes that the government can give priority to relying on technological innovation to accelerate the development and promotion of energysaving and emission-reduction technologies.

Automated summary

By studying the sustainable development paths of the top five energy consumers (China, the United States, India, Japan, and Russia), this research aims to achieve coordinated development between domestic and global economy in response to the growing energy demand. The findings suggest that technological factors and urbanization are the main driving forces behind energy consumption growth, while energy intensity and R&D efficiency act as barriers. Therefore, the government should prioritize technological innovation to accelerate the development and promotion of energy-saving and emission-reduction technologies.