Research On Carbon Efficiency In China

Energy plays an indispensable role in the course of people development, but at the same time the greenhouse gas such as CO2 derived from the energy lead to serious weather problem——the world's climate might suddenly warm and cool, and Human survival environment suffer serious damage. In the world low carbon economy rise against the most serious environmental issues, which profoundly influence the world economic development. As far as our country is concerned, the low carbon wave highlights the urgency of transformation of the pattern of economic development at present. In recent years although the government have made a lot of efforts in energy saving and emission reduction, Premier Wen in his government work report 2012 recognized that did not complete the task of energy saving and emission reduction during the eleventh five-year plan. Obviously, in the process of industrialization and urbanization China need more time to break through the path dependence on extensive growth. To balance the relationship between economic development and the environment, and break the dilemma of development and climate change, should be a strategic task for China.Based on the achievements of the recent studies, the paper studies theoretically and empirically China's economic growth under the constraints of energy conservation and emission reduction. And discuss ways to sustainable development through the viewpoint of technological progress and structural change. The paper comprehensively reviews the related literature at home and abroad, sorts out the research ideas and methods about the economic growth theory considering the energy and environment constraint, low carbon economy theory and industrial structure theory. On this basis, through the enterprise behavior view theorially analyzes the relationship between low carbon economy and sustainable development.Based on the Stokey-Agion theoretical framework, the paper studies relationship between structure change and the sustainable growth, then analyzes some necessary conditions for coordinating the environmental and economic Win-win development. Stokey-Agion model lays the basis for the study of sustainable development under environmental constraints, but it also has obvious defects:ignoring the homogeneity of the industry, so it ignored effects and mean of the structure adjustment in energy conservation and emission reduction. Dividing the economy into clean industry and pollution industry will do good to identify the problem. Thus considering the heterogeneity of different department dependent on the environment, the contribution of clean industry to the output is expanding constantly, which not only reduce pollution intensity and increase consumer welfare, and be able to maintain and even promote economic growth. Different from related literatures, this work helps us to rethink an endogenous power in economic growth.This paper evaluates the carbon productivity growth in China during 1978—2008,then analyzes the factors influencing its performance:technical progress, industrial structure change, energy consumption structure. The main conclusions show that carbon productivity improved 249% over the period with average annual growth rate of 4.26%,and this was mainly driven by technology progress,which almost account for all contribution.energy consumption structure had a minimal influence on carbon productivity growth,while industrial structure change even lowered carbon productivity growth.Based on 6 sectors panel data, the paper use SBM model to estimate environmental efficiency and carbon emissions efficiency for 6 sectors in china from 1990—2008. We find that the industry and business have higher SBM efficiency score,which produce more output with less CO2 emission; Other Services are holding up well in recent years, but the building and transportation industry show poor environmental efficiency, just making less output with more CO2 emission. We first compute the environmental efficiency (TFCE), which is defined as the ratio of the targeted CO2 emission to real CO2 emission, and enable us to estimate the performance of CO2 abatement in the industries or regions.This paper estimates and analyzes CO2 shadow price in 1990-2008.Our results are obviously lower than the previous literature, which we think accord with the theoretical logic and practice. The research found that CO2 shadow price of different industries differs from each other, which reflect different industries have obviously different marginal cost in omission reduction. The difference is closely related to production efficiency under the constraint of carbon emissions. Further, the paper discussed the two main applications of CO2 shadow price in public environment policy:the determination of carbon emissions trading market price and carbon tax rates. We think lower carbon emissions trading price and carbon tax rates mirrors the actual marginal cost in carbon emission reduction...