Network analysis reveals that industrial-chain proximity increases inter-provincial embodied energy flows across China, indicating a need to align supply security with market-driven allocation.
This study investigates how supply-demand matching drives China’s inter-provincial embodied energy flows. Unlike symmetric similarity measures, our directional industrial-chain proximity index (CDI) compares origin supply structures with destination intermediate-demand structures. Using 2012 and 2017 multi-regional input-output tables and 2022 energy statistics for 925 directed province pairs, we find that greater proximity significantly increases embodied energy flows. Geographic distance suppresses overall flows yet amplifies this matching effect, operating as a spatial sorting mechanism, whereas supply-demand structural mismatch weakens it. Resource-supply provinces respond more strongly as destinations than as origins. Our findings highlight the need to align supply-security arrangements with market-responsive allocation.
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Kong et al. (2026) studied this question.
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