UNCORRECTED PROOF JPO 5592 1–10 Journal of Policy Modeling xxx (2006) xxx–xxx Can China contribute more to the fight 3 against global warming? 4 Ugur Soytas a,∗ , Ramazan Sari b a Middle East Technical University, Department of Business Administration, Ankara 06531, Turkey 5 b Abant Izzet Baysal University, Turkey 6 Received 1 April 2006; received in revised form 1 June 2006; accepted 1 June 2006 7 Abstract 8 The greenhouse gas emissions of China are still high and are expected to rise, although China has taken 9 serious steps in solving the problem. Increasing efforts to conserve energy may contribute significantly to 10 the mitigation attempts to global warming. Therefore, it is necessary to understand how reducing the growth 11 rate of energy consumption may affect the economic growth rate in China. This paper investigates the 12 temporal relationship between the growth rates of energy consumption and GDP in China in a multivariate 13 framework. We find some evidence that China may consider reducing the growth of energy consumption 14 without significantly hampering economic growth. 15 © 2006 Published by Elsevier Inc. on behalf of Society for Policy Modeling. 16 JEL classification: Q43; O53 17 Keywords: Energy consumption; Economic growth; China 18 19 1. Introduction 20 Since it has been declared that the global warming is a serious problem that needs immediate 21 attention (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), 2004), the 22 major concern of governments has been on the reducing GHG without hindering economic growth. 23 We cannot say that governments have been successful on this issue since one of the most important 24 causes of global warming is the emissions of greenhouse gasses (GHG) and the main source of 25 these GHG emissions is energy consumption. Therefore, reducing energy consumption emerges 26 ∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +90 312 210 2010; fax: +90 312 210 1243. E-mail address: soytas@ba.metu.edu.tr (U. Soytas). 1 0161-8938/$ – see front matter © 2006 Published by Elsevier Inc. on behalf of Society for Policy Modeling. 2 doi:10.1016/j.jpolmod.2006.06.016