ABSTRACT
China is the world’s largest iron and steel producing, consuming and net exporting country, with crude steel output in 2010 reaching 627 million tonnes, making up 44.33% of the world’s crude steel production (China Steel Yearbook (2011), 2011). As a high energy-consuming and high pollution-discharging manufacturing sector, the iron and steel companies are confronted with the increasing cost of materials and exerted environmental pressure including greenhouse gas emissions (Price et al., 2002; Cornillie and Fankhauser, 2004; Lin et al., 2011). As energy and resources have been a major bottleneck for the rapid development of the steel industry, the introduction of energy saving technologies, improvement of the efficiency of energy utilization, and reduction of emissions are the only ways out for the development of the steel industry (Persson et al., 2007). A research showed that more than half of the reductions in China’s
energy consumption came from improving energy efficiency (Fisher-Vanden and Jefferson, 2004). The adoption of energy-saving technology at the enterprise level was considered to be the main reason for improved energy efficiency in China (Lin and Polenske, 1995; Garbaccio et al., 1999). Several studies have shown a focus on productivity and technical efficiency (Jefferson, 1990; Wu, 1995; Ma, 2002; Movshuk, 2004), energy use and CO2 emissions (Wu, 2000; Price et al., 2002; Wang et al., 2007). However, studies on energy consumption that relate to enterprises of different scale are rarely reported. As is well known, one of the important characteristics of China’s iron and steel sector is the high proportion of small to medium-sized business entities. Therefore, classification of the enterprises in this sector is particularly desirable.
