Research On China's Provincial Environmental Total Factor Productivity Calculation,Convergence And Influencing Factors

Currently,the increasingly serious environmental problem has become an important reason of hindering economic and social sustainable development.How to effectively solve the problem of environment pollution and resource shortage has become the focus of academic research.After the rapid development of the reform and open policy,China has made great achievements and become the world's second largest economy.However,the rapid development of China is based on the cost of the ecological environment.China's economic growth is accompanied by a large number of resource consumption and pollution emissions.Environmental problems have affected sustainable economic growth in China.Ministry of Environmental Protection estimates that the economic losses caused by environmental pollution and ecological destruction accounts for about 7?8%of GDP in 2014,and this proportion is increasing year by year.Thus,the problem of environmental pollution in China must be stopped.We can not continue to pollute the environment in China.Learning the lessons of the current haze problem,environmental issues should be highly concerned about.In recent years,the construction of ecological civilization and new economic growth model have been clearly put forward by Chinese government."Transformation of economic growth" is no longer relying on increasing funding and material resources but to stimulate economic development by increasing productivity.Meanwhile,Increase in productivity is the source of sustainable development based on neoclassical theory of economic growth.Therefore,Productivity has become one of the most important tools for economic growth issues in academic research.Chinese and foreign scholars have studied the productivity of China based on different perspectives and have got a lot of conclusions.However,due to limitations of the research methods and other aspects,there are still some deficiencies on the research of China's total factor productivity in the existing literature.Only considering labor,capital and other traditional production factors,the current literatures neglect the resources and environment factors that are related closely to the sustainable economic development.Current literature can't handle the case that radial and non-radial features exist in both input and output variables.There are no deep researches on the regional disparity of China's total factor productivity under constraints of resource and environment.They don't accurately portray the long-term trends of the environmental total factor productivity distribution.Supposing that the economic units exist independently and ignoring the spatial correlation and spatial spillover effects of the economic units.Research on the influencing factors of China's total factor productivity should be further improved.Environmental pollution and shortage of resources is getting worse in China.We should not only attach importance to the relationship between input savings and economic growth,but also consider the carrying capacity of resources and environment,sequentially achieving a win-win balance between environmental protection and economic development.Environmental pollution reduction and energy conservation are the main issues of ecological economic performance researches,and they are also research issues of environmental total factor productivity.Improving environmental total factor productivity has become an inevitable requirement which can resolve resource crisis and construct intensive economic growth model.Thus,to overcome the limitations of existing research,conducting researches of calculation,convergence and influencing factors analysis on Chinese provincial environmental total factor productivity has become necessary and urgent.Under the background of building "beautiful China" and China's new normal economic development,our primary goal is to take resource and environmental factors into the traditional measurement of total factor productivity.We want to know the Chinese provincial environmental total factor productivity when considering the constraints of resource and environment.This paper analyzes the convergence and the influencing factors of Chinese provincial environmental total factor productivity which can provide theoretical support for the development of public policy that contribute to achieving sustainable development of environment and economy.These can help to speed up the transformation of economic growth mode and form a new pattern of human harmony with nature.By doing this,we can make contribution to global ecological security.This article has important practical significance under the background of the Communist Party of China's 18th Central Committee.This study contributes to achieve a win-win balance between environmental protection and economic development.The paper is divided into six parts,the main contents and the related conclusions are as follows:Content 1:Evaluating Chinese provincial environmental total factor productivity considering constraints of resource and environmentThis content applies Epsilon-Based Measure model and Malmquist-Luenberger productivity index to estimate Chinese provincial environmental total factor productivity and efficiency over the period from 2002 to 2013 while accounting for factors about resource and environment.The major conclusions are as follows:(1)Different evaluation methods have a significant impact on the results of Chinese provincial environmental efficiency and environmental total factor productivity.Compared with other methods,the environmental productivity evaluation results of EBM-Malmquist-Luenberger model based on undesirable output are more accurate.(2)2002—2013 Chinese provincial environmental efficiency of EBM model based on undesirable output is between 0.77 to 0.82.Among them,the average environmental efficiency value in 2002 is the highest.The environmental efficiency value in 2008—2013 is lower than that in 2002—2007.This indicates that the coordination between economic development and environmental protection in the majority of Chinese provinces is in decline.Environmental efficiency of EBM model based on undesirable output exists spatial correlation and cluster property.(3)The difference of environmental efficiency in the three regions is more obvious.The environmental efficiency of eastern provinces is about 0.94,most of the central province is about 0.76,the western provinces is only about 0.63.(4)Overall,the pace of Chinese provincial environmental efficiency improvement is accelerating in 2002—2013.The environmental total factor productivity trends of the three regions are broadly consistent with the whole country.However,significant differences still exist in the environmental total factor productivity of different regions.The environmental total factor productivity of eastern provinces is the highest,followed by the western provinces,central provinces is the lowest.(5)The main driving force of the country's environmental total factor productivity improving is technological progress.The technical efficiency will reduce environmental total factor productivity.Calculation of the intertemporal environmental total factor productivity decomposition in 29 Chinese provinces is different.Content 2:Testing convergence of Chinese provincial environmental total factor productivityBased on the measurement and calculation of Chinese provincial environmental total factor productivity in content 1,in this content the convergence hypothesis of the environmental total factor productivity has been tested.The convergence hypothesis includes?convergence,unconditional?convergence,conditional(3 convergence,and dynamic distribution.The empirical results indicate that:(1)Chinese provincial environmental total factor productivity shows no absolute convergence,which means environmental total factor productivity regional differences will not disappear automatically unconditionally.The remarkable unconditional ? convergence exists in the environmental total factor productivity growth of the whole country and eastern region,but environmental total factor productivity of central and western China shows no obviously unconditional ? convergence.The remarkable conditional ? convergence exists in the environmental total factor productivity growth of the whole country except the western region.(2)Concentration of provincial cumulative relative environmental total factor productivity over the period of 2003 to 2013 is decreasing.Provincial gap and polarization increase gradually.Environmental total factor productivity growth shows "Club convergence" phenomenon.(3)Dynamic distribution analysis has shown that the mobility of Chinese provincial environmental total factor productivity is low.This again proves that the regional disparities of Chinese provincial environmental total factor productivity will continue a long time.Content 3:Analyzing the influencing factors of Chinese provincial environmental total factor productivityIn this content we use spatial econometric methods to find out the influencing factors of Chinese provincial environmental total factor productivity.The reasons for using spatial econometric method are that:Each province does not exist independently and there are economic and social contacts among the provinces,the traditional econometric model assumption does not hold because of the spatial interaction of economic behavior in different regions.The spatial econometric results are as follows:(1)There is a significant spatial correlation of Chinese provincial environmental total factor productivity during the period range of the sample.The spatial distribution of Chinese provincial environmental total factor productivity shows significant accumulation feature.The mobility of Chinese provincial environmental total factor productivity is low.(2)The geographical factor has significant impact on Chinese provincial environmental total factor productivity.With the gradual perfection of the Chinese socialist market system and the expansion of regional opening,the spatial fluidity of production factors is bigger and the connection between different provinces is faster,all these will cause the spatial correlation of provincial environmental total factor productivity.(3)In the identification of influencing factors in the process of inspection,it shows that the foreign direct investment level,the strength of the government environmental regulation,the risen of secondary industry proportion have a significant negative influence on Chinese provincial environmental total factor productivity,but the increase of energy consumption and the improvement of economic level will promote our country's provincial environmental total factor productivity.(4)Effects of independent innovation and technology introduction on Chinese provincial environmental total factor productivity are very different.Independent innovation has a significant positive influence on Chinese provincial environmental total factor productivity,but technology introduction has a slight negative effect on our country's provincial environmental total factor productivity.The introduction of technology in China has a certain degree of invalidity,but the positive effect of independent innovation is greater.Thus,the total effect of technological progress on the environmental total factor productivity is positive.Based on the empirical study,this thesis puts forward the following advices to promote the harmonious development between resource environment and economic growth:improving the quality of economic growth and transforming the economic development model,actively guiding the flow of foreign investment and optimizing the structure of foreign investment,enhancing the capability of independent innovation and introducing advanced technology scientifically,promoting industrial restructuring and accelerating the optimization and upgrading of industrial structure,optimizing the energy structure and vigorously developing clean energy,adjusting government environmental regulation measures to ensure the coherence of environmental policy,coordinating green consumption supply-side reforms to promote sustained ecological economic growth,developing differentiated provincial environmental TFP growth policy.This research provides a complete analytical framework and method to measure the cost of resources and environment introduced by the China's economic growth.The results not only contribute to a more objective assessment of China's ecological economic development quality,but also have some benefits to the construction of"beautiful China" and achieving a win-win balance between environmental protection and economic development.