Synergies of the Sharing Economy: Its Role in China's Energy Transition and Sustainable Development

The sharing economy (SECO) has become a disruptive economic model with implications for both economic performance and energy systems. This paper analyzes the relationships among SECO, GDP per capita, and nuclear energy consumption (NEC) in China from 2005 to 2020. The analysis addresses heterogeneous associations among various points of the conditional distribution by using a quantile autoregressive distributed lag (QARDL) framework. The findings show that SECO correlates positively with GDP per capita across most quantiles, suggesting that it contributes to improving economic activity by better resource use and the adoption of digital platforms. On the contrary, the dependency between SECO and NEC is observed to be strong only at the higher quantiles, indicating that its impact on energy dynamics is more significant under conditions of high energy demand. The results also indicate a high degree of heterogeneity and two-way predictive relationships among variables, suggesting the presence of dynamic feedback mechanisms rather than unidirectional influence. The results should be considered indicative associations rather than causal relationships, given the use of proxy measures, the small sample size, and the observational design. Overall, the research provides fine-tuning evidence on the context-specificity of the sharing economy in shaping economic and energy-related dynamics in China's changing development environment.