Evaluation And Mechanism Analysis For The Impact Of Low-carbon Pilot Policies On Energy Efficiency

Since the reform and opening up,with high-intensity inputs of production factors,The national economy has achieved rapid development for more than 40 years,and in 2010,China became the largest manufacturing country with its huge production capacity industrial system.However,while the economic development achievements have attracted worldwide attention,the huge consumption of energy resources has also led to a large amount of carbon dioxide emissions,and our country is facing tremendous pressure to reduce carbon emission.Therefore,it is a rational choice to seek a low-carbon economic development path that is a win-win situation for both emission reduction and economy development.In view of this,in order to avoid "locked in high-carbon",the National Development and Reform Commission launched the country’s first batch of low-carbon city pilots in 2010,in order to promote the implementation of the carbon dioxide emission intensity reduction target promised by the Chinese government.This paper firstly examines the energy efficiency development level of the pilot cities,seeks theoretical factors that contribute to the improvement of energy efficiency,and makes mechanism assumptions.Then combined with the relevant implementation plan of the low-carbon pilot area,based on the prefecture-level cities’ panel data which is from2005 to 2016,the DID model was used to study the impact of low-carbon pilot policies on energy efficiency.The research results show that in period of the sample research,the low-carbon pilot policy has a negative impact on energy intensity,the same word,the pilot policy can positively affect the energy efficiency of the pilot city,but the results of parameter estimation are not accurate and are not statistically significant.After a series of robustness tests,the research conclusions are still valid.At the same time,in order to test whether the policy effect has a short-term impact effect,this paper conducts a dynamic DID analysis,but the corresponding coefficient is still not significant.The mechanism analysis to explore the underlying reasons shows that the low-carbon pilot policy has not been able to significantly affect the possible mechanism variables,resulting in the failure to significantly promote energy-saving effects.In order to eliminate the impact of heterogeneous treatment effects,this paper uses a multi-period DID model that considers the heterogeneous treatment effects and batches to evaluate the effects of pilot policies in pilot cities.The evaluation results show that the policy’s influence on the two batches of pilot cities is opposite.There are differences between the two batches of pilot cities.The second batch of pilot cities has better pilot effects than the first batch of pilot cities.Therefore,this article believes that more follow-up studies should be conducted.Comprehensively summarize the pilot experience of low-carbon pilot cities,and further promote low-carbon pilot policies,actively explore the development model of cities to improve energy efficiency from multiple angles.