An evolutionary analysis of new energy and industry policy tools in China based on large-scale policy topic modeling

This study investigates the evolution of provincial new energy policies and industries of China using a topic modeling approach. To this end, six out of 31 provinces in China are first selected as research samples, central and provincial new energy policies in the period of 2010 to 2019 are collected to establish a text corpus with 23, 674 documents. Then, the policy corpus is fed to two different topic models, one is the Latent Dirichlet Allocation for modeling static policy topics, another is the Dynamic Topic Model for extracting topics over time. Finally, the obtained topics are mapped into policy tools for comparisons. The dynamic policy topics are further analyzed with the panel data from provincial new energy industries. The results show that the provincial new energy policies moved to different tracks after about 2014 due to the regional conditions such as the economy and CO2 emission intensity. Underdeveloped provinces tend to use environment-oriented tools to regulate and control CO2 emissions, while developed regions employ the more balanced policy mix for improving new energy vehicles and other industries. Widespread hysteretic effects are revealed during the correlation analysis of the policy topics and new energy capacity.