How Efficient Is China’s Heavy Industry? A Perspective of Input–Output Analysis

Heavy industry accounts for nearly 65% of the energy consumption and over 60% of the electricity consumption of China. Under the framework of real savings and green GDP, the huge energy consumption and carbon emissions will bring in huge natural resource losses, and then affect the total factor productivity (TFP) seriously. When taking the input–output relationship into consideration, the natural resource losses of heavy industry will decrease significantly. As the upstream of the industrial chain, heavy industry offered a large number of subsidies to the downstream industries by providing energy, raw materials, and taking on carbon emissions. This article verified the transfer of natural resource losses among industries, and estimated the real TFP of heavy industry from input–output and traditional perspective, respectively. The results showed that there was an increasing trend in the growth rate of heavy industry’s TFP in the perspective of input–output.