Research On The Measurement And Influential Factors Of China’s Foreign Trade Embodied-carbon And Value-added Index

Since the 1990 s,by embedding in Global Value Chains(GVC)actively,China has been gradually surpassing Japan to become the "world factory",and plays an important role in the international economic system increasingly.However,after recalculating the trade benefits of China’s participation in international trade by using the value-added accounting method,the academic community found that China is locked in the low-end state of low value-added of international division of labor.At the same time,the rapid development of China’s economy has significantly increased the consumption of material resources,especially the large number of high-emission and high-pollution industries have led to China’s becoming an important source of carbon dioxide emissions.According to the data released by the International Energy Agency,China’s carbon dioxide emissions have ranked first in the world.Therefore,while China is actively embedded in GVC through trade activities,it is also facing high pressure to reduce carbon emissions.These two problems need to be urgently resolved.However,in the existing theoretical research,the solutions to these two problems are mostly researched independently,and few studies have been conducted on the advantages and disadvantages of China’s trade under the same framework.Based on the background above,this thesis uses the latest measurement methods to measure the real benefits(trade value-added)and real costs(trade embodied-carbon)of China’s participation in international trade.Then these two variables are combined to build a new index,the trade embodied-carbon and value-added index.After sorting out the influential factors that affect the real benefits of trade(trade value-added)and the real costs paid(trade embodied-carbon),this thesis analyzed the relevant factors from the empirical perspective to increase trade embodied-carbon and value-added index.So this thesis put forward countermeasures to increase the trade embodiedcarbon and value-added index in the end.This research finds that through the construction and analysis of the trade embodied-carbon and value-added index of import and export trade,China’s overall trade embodied-carbon and value-added index of import and export trade has been at a relatively low level in the early stage of the sample,but has risen to a higher level by2014.This shows that China has made some desirable progress in solving the two problems of large carbon emissions and low domestic value-added at the same time.This thesis further conducts empirical research on the influencing factors of the trade embodied-carbon and value-added index of import and export from two levels.The first level is a factor decomposition analysis of the internal direct factors,and it is found that changes in the trade value added have a greater impact on changes in the trade embodied-carbon and value-added index.The second level is an empirical study using technological innovation as a key external influencing factor.It is found that personnel input has the largest impact on the trade embodied-carbon and value-added index in export trade,funding input has the greatest effect on the trade embodied-carbon and value-added index in import trade,and the impact coefficients of patent output on the trade embodied-carbon and value-added index of import and export trade are both negative.The main contributions of this thesis are: firstly,it provide China with a quantitative indicator that can take into account trade gains and environmental costs when measuring trade gains and losses;Secondly,it builds both the export trade embodied-carbon and value-added index and the import trade embodied-carbon and value-added index,has enriched the research perspective;Thirdly,based on the study of influencing factors,it puts forward targeted policy recommendations to promote the improvement of China’s foreign trade embodied-carbon and value-added index.