Impact of COVID-19 on China's coal imports: effects and solutions

Abstract

This paper analyzes the impact of COVID-19 on China's coal import trade. First , this paper makes a qualitative analysis of the status quo of China's coal import scale before and after COVID-19. Second, the impact of the pandemic on China's coal import was estimated by panel VAR model based on the confirmed global COVID-19 data and China's coal import data with Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering database and Wind database from January 2019 to June 2021. The result shows that the pandemic has a significant impact on both the supply and demand of China's coal industry in short term. There is a rebound in coal demand due to manufacturing industries having resumed work and production under the successful pandemic control in China. Finally, this paper analyzes the measures of China's coal import process during the COVID-19 and suggests how to deal with the global public crisis in the future.

Keywords:

• Public crisis
• coal import trade
• coal industry
• COVID-19

Acknowledgement

The authors thank anonymous referees and the editors of this journal for their very insightful and constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Chen,Z.(2020). Zhijin in Bijie, Guizhou: Government and Enterprise Join Forces to Help Resumption of Work and Production, Taking Multiple Measures to Solve the Urgency of Burning "Coal".Guizhou Daily.

2 See China Statistical Yearbook,Retrieved from http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjsj/ndsj/.

3 See Platts Coal Trader International,Retrieved from https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/products-services/coal/coal-trader-international.

4 National Bureau of Statistics, January-February 2020 energy production, March 6, 2020See National Bureau of Statistics,Retrieved from http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjsj/ndsj/2021/indexch.htm.

Additional information

Funding

This research is supported by the Major Project of Philosophy and Social Sciences Research in Colleges and Universities of Hubei Province. [21ZD013], Postgraduate research and innovation project of Zhongnan University of Economics and Law [202251081].