Energy Economics and Policy

Copyright © 2013 Zhan-Ming Chen et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. There are emerging concerns worldwide on management of energy resources and its development, such as control of the environmental impact of energy use, regulation and expedition of the commercialization of renewable energy, and reevaluation of the safety issue of nuclear power. As a result, theoretical and empirical studies on energy economics and relevant policies are of emergent need to assess the performance of previous efforts as well as to guide future development. Especially, investigations on the characters of energy market and governments' roles in it are of significant implication for decision makers concerning different aspects of energy management. 20 papers selected from 36 submissions are published in this issue, which cover many important topics in the field of energy economics and policy. At the macroscale, P. Massot and Z.-M. Chen review the history of global uranium market and discuss the potential coexistence between the rising market of China and the rest of the world. X. H. Xia and Y. Hu use China's subprovince and prefecture level data to analyze the determinants of electricity consumption intensity. B. Zhang et al. provide an overview of resources use and environmental impact of the Chinese industry during 1997– 2006 based on an exergetic assessment. The fossil fuels inputs in China during 2000–2010 are estimated by S. Wang et al. in a material flow analysis which takes hidden flows into account. Acknowledging the importance of infrastructure investment for the Chinese economy, the embodied energy use in China's infrastructure investment during 1992–2007 is evaluated by H. Liu et al. based on an energy input-output model. S. Lee et al. analyze the potential economic and environmental effects of carbon tax in Japan using a global macroeconometric model. In the study by F. Tao et al., the directional distance function and the Luenberger productivity index are applied to measure the industry efficiency and total factor productivity at the level of subindustry in China during 1999–2009. By employing an input-output model, S. Guo et al. construct an embodied greenhouse gases emissions inventory for Beijing. Fuel consumption and exhaust emissions, including nitrogen oxides and particulate matters, by China's auto industry are estimated and related mitigation policies are discussed by Wu et al. In …