IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/irapec/v33y2019i3p314-334.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Renewable energy investment and employment in China

Author

Listed:
  • Ying Chen

Abstract

The potential trade-off between environmental protection and employment stability has been a concern in the literature. However, in the case of China, the employment issue has not been adequately addressed despite government’s big push on investing in renewable energy since 2007. This essay addresses the employment issue through estimating the relative employment impacts of renewable energy investments versus spending within the traditional fossil fuel sectors based on input-output modeling with China-specific data of sector and subsector weighting techniques. I find that spending within three segments of the renewable energy sectors – solar, wind and bioenergy, will produce in combination about twice as many jobs per dollar of expenditure than an equal amount of spending on fossil fuels. I also find that, more than 70 percent of jobs from renewable energy sectors are created in the informal economy. This raises questions about the quality of the jobs created through renewable energy investments.

Suggested Citation

  • Ying Chen, 2019. "Renewable energy investment and employment in China," International Review of Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 33(3), pages 314-334, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:irapec:v:33:y:2019:i:3:p:314-334
    DOI: 10.1080/02692171.2018.1513458
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/02692171.2018.1513458
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/02692171.2018.1513458?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Saboori, Behnaz & Gholipour, Hassan F. & Rasoulinezhad, Ehsan & Ranjbar, Omid, 2022. "Renewable energy sources and unemployment rate: Evidence from the US states," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 168(C).
    2. Yingdan Mei & Pengfei Liu & Lina Meng & Lu Lin, 2024. "Evaluate the Impacts of Wind Farm Facilities on Land Values with Geographically-Linked Microdata in China," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 87(2), pages 465-489, February.
    3. Ying Chen & An Li, 2021. "Global Green New Deal: A Global South perspective," The Economic and Labour Relations Review, , vol. 32(2), pages 170-189, June.
    4. Gupta, Ruchi & Guibentif, Thomas M.M. & Friedl, Markus & Parra, David & Patel, Martin Kumar, 2023. "Macroeconomic analysis of a new green hydrogen industry using Input-Output analysis: The case of Switzerland," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 183(C).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:irapec:v:33:y:2019:i:3:p:314-334. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/CIRA20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.