Transportation infrastructure and efficient energy services: A perspective of China's manufacturing industry

Transportation infrastructure and efficient energy services are closely related to the economy and national strategic competitiveness. Whether there are internal influence mechanisms behind their similar growth trends is a question worthy of further discussion. Given the fundamental and leading role played by infrastructure investment and energy cooperation in international exchanges, studying this global issue can provide a new perspective and reference for policy-makers' macroeconomic planning. However, there is very little literature investigating the influencing mechanism of transportation infrastructure on the efficient energy services of countries. The energy consumption of China's manufacturing industry accounted for 12.8% of the world in 2016, which makes the sector suitable as our research object. Using the provincial panel data from 1998 to 2016, this paper quantitatively calculates the effective energy services of the manufacturing industry in China and adopts the convergence analysis to find the phenomenon that the gaps of effective energy services between the three regions (east, central and west) are growing. The empirical results indicate that the development of transportation infrastructure, economic growth, technological progress, optimization of industrial structure, and the decline of energy price will significantly improve the effective energy service. Moreover, the panel threshold model is applied to demonstrate that the influence of transportation infrastructure on effective energy services in the context of income heterogeneity shows a nonlinear rising characteristic. The construction of transportation infrastructure plays an increasingly vital role in promoting effective energy services for the manufacturing industry in the central and western regions. Based on the above conclusions, we not only put forward some targeted policy recommendations to improve the policy design of the Chinese government, but also provide references for the transportation infrastructure cooperation in countries with different economic development levels along the Belt and Road Initiative.