1. Introduction
China’s economy has experienced long-term high-speed development, and the resulting resources and environmental problems have become increasingly prominent, making the transformation of the economic development model an inevitable choice for sustained and healthy development of the Chinese economy. As China’s economic development enters the “new normal”, China has proposed an initiative called the new and old kinetic energy conversion (NOKEC), which is a major strategic move to achieve innovation-driven development and promote the economic transformation from high-speed growth to high-quality development [
1]. The NOKEC refers to cultivating new kinetic energy and transforming old kinetic energy. Specifically, the new kinetic energy means the new impetus, new technologies, new industries, new formats and new models for economic and social development formed in the new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation; the old kinetic energy indicates traditional kinetic energy, which not only involves high-energy-consumption and high-pollution manufacturing, but also covers the first, second and third industries that operate under the traditional business model [
2]. Overall, the NOKEC is a new embodiment of economic restructuring in the new era combined with China’s actual national conditions. Its purpose is to solve the problem of overcapacity, improve the efficiency of resource allocation and achieve orderly industrial continuity, so as to maintain stable and sustainable economic development.
From a global perspective, the NOKEC is not only an objective law of the evolution of the world economy, but also an inevitable requirement for the sustainable development of the new technological revolution. From the perspective of domestic development, the NOKEC is the fundamental way for China to move into the high-end of the global value chain and enter a new era of economic development [
3,
4].
Shandong’s economic structure is highly similar to that of China, with strong typical demonstrations. Therefore, on January 3, 2018, the China State Council approved the
Overall Plan for the Construction of a New and Old Kinetic Energy Conversion Pilot Area in Shandong Province, marking the official establishment of the Shandong New and Old Kinetic Energy Conversion Comprehensive Experimental Zone (Shandong NOKEC-CEZ) [
5]. In this context, Shandong Province becomes an important demonstration province for China to implement the NOKEC policy, and accelerating the construction of Shandong NOKEC-CEZ is conducive to providing experience for the NOKEC in China.
Generally, the process of NOKEC is not only a process of cultivating new energy and power, but also a process of accelerating the release of various risks and contradictions [
6]. Therefore, the government should attach great importance to various kinds of contradictions arising from the transition between the old and new kinetic energy and formulate measures to solve these contradictions and risks in time, so as to prevent large-scale or regional economic risks [
7]. Related scholars have investigated the characteristics and significance of NOKEC, for instance, Bai et al. (2018) pointed out that in recent years, the most significant characteristic of China’s economic development is the NOKEC, forming a clear differentiation among industries and speeding up the economic structure adjustment process [
8]. Although China’s economic development is still facing tremendous pressure, the risks in some economic regions will be accelerated and the difficulties in economic operation will increase; the advantages of China’s long-term economic development have not changed fundamentally. Zeng (2017) analyzed the significance of the NOKEC from five levels namely the instrumental, technical, industrial, institutional, and conceptual level [
9].
Meanwhile, some scholars explored the development path of NOKEC. By examining the connotation and mode of NOKEC, Yang and Jiao (2018) analyzed the dynamic evolution of NOKEC from the two-dimensional perspective of technical efficiency and technological progress, finding that NOKEC has different development paths ranging from government-led to government-guided, from key demonstrations to comprehensive advancement, from factor-driven to innovation-driven, and from incremental innovation to subversive innovation [
10]. Zhang and Li (2018) investigated the development paths of NOKEC for financial industry, that is, creating a new model of financial services relying on innovative thinking, so as to achieve deep integration of finance and multi-industry, multi-format or multi-mode [
11]. Zhang et al. (2018) pointed out that there are certain regional differences in traditional kinetic energy, growth kinetic energy and potential kinetic energy in Shandong Province, and the transformation of government functions, the marketization process and rational industrial structure are of great significance for the cultivation of new regional kinetic energy and the breakthrough of NOKEC [
12]. In addition, in order to accelerate the NOKEC, some other scholars have also proposed different path choices, such as Huang (2017) [
13], Zhang and Zhang (2017) [
14], and Zhang (2017) [
15].
The existing researches mainly focus on the concepts and implementation paths of NOKEC, analyzing the relationships between NOKEC, macroeconomics and industrial structure [
16,
17], and pay less attention to the role of the power industry in the NOKEC. In fact, many scholars employed a large amount of electricity consumption data to analyze the trend of economic growth, finding that there is very close correlation between electricity and economy [
18,
19,
20]. Meanwhile, the electricity consumption data is usually more accurate, resulting that the characteristics and trends of the economy reflected by power data may be more objective and credible [
21,
22]. From this perspective, electric power can be called the “barometer” and “thermometer” of national economic development [
23], revealing that electric power can provide endogenous support to meet the NOKEC. Therefore, when evaluating the effectiveness of NOKEC, it is necessary to take electricity utilization factors into account, so as to assess if it indeed does help to meet the targets. Moreover, although some scholar investigated the effectiveness of NOKEC [
24,
25,
26], there is no unified method to evaluate the effectiveness of the NOKEC, so that the development paths of NOKEC proposed by many scholars are theoretically feasible, but it is difficult to make a scientific and reasonable test of the actual effects.
In the context of NOKEC characterized by macroeconomic transformation and industrial restructuring, this paper examines the roles of power industry in NOKEC and constructs an index system involving three evaluation dimensions, that is, economic development, electricity utilization and energy efficiency, which can fully reflect the implementation effects of NOKEC. Further, a hybrid evaluation model based on DEMATEL-ANP and difference-quotient grey relational analysis (DQ-GRA) techniques is applied to evaluate the effectiveness of NOKEC of Shandong Province in China, based on the construction achievements of Shandong NOKEC-CEZ. On the whole, the contributions of this paper include:
(1) Standing in an electric power economics perspective, this paper constructs a scientific and adequate index system for evaluating the NOKEC effectiveness considering the goals of NOKEC and the roles of power industry in NOKEC and proposes a hybrid evaluation model to evaluate the effectiveness of NOKEC in Shandong Province. The research results can enrich the existing researches on the NOKEC and have certain practical value for the promotion of the NOKEC in Shandong Province.
(2) The proposed hybrid evaluation model based on DEMATEL-ANP and DQ-GRA considers the interaction between evaluation indicators and overcomes the limitations of conventional GRA that considers only the geometric similarity between data sequences, while it ignores the degree of numerical proximity. The proposed model can make full use of the information of the objects to be evaluated and has good applicability and promotion value for similar comprehensive evaluation issues.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows:
Section 2 explains the goals of NOKEC in Shandong Province and the support of power industry to NOKEC;
Section 3 introduces the constructed NOKEC effectiveness evaluation index system and the proposed hybrid evaluation model;
Section 4 represents the evaluation results of the NOKEC effectiveness in Shandong Province; finally,
Section 5 summarizes the research contents and findings of this paper.
5. Conclusions and Discussions
5.1. Conclusions
Based on the construction achievements of Shandong NOKEC-CEZ, this paper analyzed the goals of the NOKEC in Shandong Province and the supporting roles of power industry to Shandong’s NOKEC. On this basis, a NOKEC effectiveness evaluation index system involving three dimensions and 17 secondary indicators was constructed from an electric power economics perspective. Taking into account the indicator attribute and the characteristics of evaluating the NOKEC effectiveness, the DEMATEL-ANP technique was applied to determine the indicator weight, and an improved GRA method called DQ-GRA was employed to calculate the closeness between the actual evaluation indicator value sequence and the target value sequence of the indicators and whose result can be considered as the NOKEC effectiveness. To verify the scientificity and applicability of the proposed model, this paper collected related data in Shandong Province from 2015–2017 and evaluated the effectiveness of Shandong’s NOKEC.
The results showed that the evaluation value of the NOKEC effectiveness in Shandong Province has increased year by year from 2015–2017, indicating that a series of measures to promote Shandong’s NOKEC have achieved a positive effect. In addition, according to the results of index weights and indicator performance values, this paper puts forward the indicators that should be paid close attention to in Shandong’s future NOKEC process, which provides an empirical reference for the further development of NOKEC in Shandong Province.
Meanwhile, the proposed hybrid evaluation model based on DEMATEL-ANP and DQ-GRA techniques has good adaptability in evaluating the NOKEC effectiveness. Specifically speaking, the weight determination method based on DEMATEL-ANP considers the interrelationships between the secondary indicators, and the evaluation method based on DQ-GRA overcomes the shortcomings of traditional GRA that considers only the geometric similarity between data sequences, but ignores the numerical proximity. Overall, the proposed hybrid evaluation model has a good promotion and application value for similar effectiveness evaluation issues.
5.2. Discussions
Although the NOKEC effectiveness evaluation model based on DEMATEL-ANP and DQ-GRA techniques proposed in this paper can be well applied to evaluate the effectiveness of NOKEC in Shandong Province, there is still room for improvement in this paper.
(1) The proposed model still has some improvements. For instance, 1) more indicators that reflect innovation can be added to the indicator system. The indicator R&D expenditure as a percentage of GDP is involved in the index system in this paper to reflect the degree of innovation, and then it can be considered to include the number of researchers and the number of patents in the evaluation index system to reflect innovation. The reason for not joining these indicators in this paper is that Shandong Province did not explicitly request these indicators in the NOKEC plan, resulting that their target values could not be obtained. 2) In this paper, the DEMATEL method is adopted to improve ANP, and the key is to determine the relationship between the primary indicators, but the establishment of the ANP structure of the secondary indicators is still subjective. Following this paper, an in-depth study can be carried out, that is, DEMATEL can be applied to the construction of the entire ANP structure so as to reduce the subjectivity.
(2) The adaptability of the proposed model in other countries remains to be discussed. NOKEC is an initiative proposed by the Chinese government to promote economic restructuring, and Shandong Province is a model province for China’s NOKEC policy. Thus, when evaluating the effectiveness of NOKEC, this paper mainly considers the actual situation of Shandong Province of China, and the index system constructed mainly reflects the goals of NOKEC in Shandong Province. However, other countries in the world, like EU countries, the United States, and Paris agreement countries, are also experiencing economic restructuring similar to China’s NOKEC. To evaluate the effectiveness of similar policies in these countries, adaptive improvement of the evaluation index system is needed. Moreover, the setting of the target value of each indicator should also be adjusted according to the actual situation of different evaluation objects.
In summary, the NOKEC effectiveness evaluation model proposed in this paper improves the framework for evaluating the effectiveness of similar economic structural transformation policies. On the basis of this paper, relevant scholars can adapt the evaluation index system and evaluation methods according to the specific characteristics of the object to be evaluated, so as to be able to evaluate the implementation effect of the policy scientifically and objectively.