Empirical research on the relationship between natural gas consumption and economic growth in the Northeast Asia

The Northeast Asia, as one of the most rapidly development regions, has a large amount of energy consumption. Therefore, it is very significant to study the relationship between natural gas consumption and economic growth in the Northeast Asia. This paper builds Panel Data Model to study the relationship between natural gas consumption and economic growth in China, Japan, and Korea from 1991 to 2015, on the basis of analyzing the impact mechanism that natural gas has on economic growth. This paper finds that the Japan's elasticity coefficient of natural gas consumption is the highest, whereas Korea's is the lowest, and China's is in the middle of these two countries, because of countries' different development level and energy consumption mode. Moreover, the results of Granger causality relationship test show that there is only one-way Granger causality relationship between natural gas consumption and economic growth of China, but no causal relationship is found for Japan and Korea.