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Ecological relationships of global construction industries in sustainable economic and energy development

journal contribution
posted on 2021-11-01, 00:00 authored by Bin Liu, Qun Gao, Lingfeng LiangLingfeng Liang, Jide Sun, Chunlu LiuChunlu Liu, Youquan Xu
Value-added trade has increased rapidly in recent decades in the context of globalisation. This paper aims to measure the energy embodied in the value-added trade and the ecological relationships in the networks of the international construction industries. A hybrid method which combines ecological network analysis and the input–output method has been adopted. The direct energy intensities in most countries ranged from 0 to 3.0 trillion joules per million US$ and the dominant relationships were control and exploitation in the selected 15 years. For the construction sector, the negative relationships were dominant at 63.9% in Australia and 79.19% in China. The ratio of positive relationships increased from 24.3% to 31.5%, while the ratio of negative relationships declined from 75.7% to 68.5% over the 15 years. The mutualism index ranged from 0.72 to 0.98 over the 15 years, maintaining a value less than 1. In contrast, the synergism index had an increase of 12.2 over the 15 years. The results indicate that both direct energy intensity and the value-added ratio are important factors in relation to the energy embodied in value-added trade. Sectoral influence on the national industrial system has been interpreted in this paper to stimulate further research.

History

Journal

Energy

Volume

234

Article number

121249

Pagination

1 - 14

Publisher

Elsevier

Location

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

ISSN

0360-5442

Language

eng

Publication classification

C1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal