Analysis Of Influence Factors Of China’s Carbon Emissions Based On Structural Equation Model

Since the reform and opening up,China’s economic train has been running at a high speed,accompanied by huge energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions.With the improvement of residents’ living standards,people not only pay attention to the economic growth rate and material basis such as clothing,food,housing and transportation,but also start to pay attention to the ecological environment and the harmonious development between human and nature.The emergence of various resources and environmental problems prompts people of all countries to actively formulate various environmental policies and reduce carbon dioxide emissions.As the world’s largest energy consumer and carbon emitter,China faces enormous pressure to reduce carbon emissions.President Xi Jinping stressed the need to maintain the strategic focus of strengthening ecological civilization construction,explore a new path of high-quality development oriented by ecological priority and green development,strengthen the protection of ecological systems,and fight pollution prevention and control.Therefore,it is of great theoretical and practical significance for China to find out the driving factors affecting China’s carbon emission and analyze the influencing path.By reviewing the predecessor literature,this paper determines to use the structural equation model as a research method,and selects 12 indicators of economic,population,energy,technology and system as observation variables.This paper collected panel data of 30 provinces in China from 1996 to 2016,and calculated the carbon emissions generated by energy consumption in China through IPCC list method,and analyzed their time evolution characteristics from the perspectives of total amount,per capita carbon emission and carbon emission intensity.On this basis,a structural equation model is proposed to empirically study the influencing factors and specific paths of carbon emissions in China from 1996 to 2016.Then the data are divided into two parts according to time for model fitting,to determine the impact of various factors in different time periods on carbon emissions and the specific path,and to compare and analyze the changes of different factors with time.The main conclusions are as follows:first,economy,population,energy,technology and system all have significant impacts on carbon emissions,and economic,technological and institutional factors have negative effects on China’s carbon dioxide emissions,while demographic and energy factors have positive effects on China’s carbon dioxide emissions.Second,the impact of each factor on carbon emissions changes over time.The impact of economy on carbon emission changes from positive to negative,indicating that changes in economic growth patterns and industrial structure have significant effects on reducing carbon emissions and improving the environment.Third,Population and energy have a significant positive impact on carbon emissions.Technology and system have always had a significant negative effect on carbon emissions,and the impact of the two increases with time.Based on the empirical results and analysis and discussion,this paper puts forward five policy Suggestions:promoting high-quality economic development,encouraging green consumption of the general residents,continuously promoting the use of clean energy,promoting continuous innovation of enterprises and society,and improving the construction of carbon emission reduction system.