Study The Effect Of Technological Progress On China's Carbon Intensity

China's climate warming problem is increasing.According to the "Blue Book on China's Climate Change 2018" issued by the China Meteorological Administration,the report pointed out that China's warming changes are more significant.Since 1951,China's surface temperature has increased by 0.24 degrees Celsius per decade,which is greater than the average of other countries and regions during the same period.Therefore,the aggravation of the greenhouse effect has created a large pressure on energy conservation and emission reduction in China.In September 2016,China joined the the Paris agreement on climate change,and China promised to the United Nations that by 2030,China's carbon emissions will peak and strive to reach peaks as soon as possible;carbon intensity(carbon emissions per unit of GDP)decreased by 60%-65% compared to 2005.At the end of 2016,the State Council issued the “13th Five-Year Plan for Controlling Greenhouse Gas Emissions” to further clarify China's task of energy conservation and emission reduction by 2020.By 2020,carbon intensity will fall by 18% from2015,industrial carbon intensity will fall by 22% from 2015.As of June 2017,most provinces combined with their own conditions,according to the “13th Five-Year Plan” to control greenhouse gas emissions,the energy conservation and emission reduction tasks also set corresponding control objectives,and as an important performance political performance task.Therefore,how to reduce carbon intensity is of great theoretical and practical significance for China,which is in the process of transforming economic growth momentum.At present,the reduction of carbon intensity is mainly achieved from the following two ways: one is structural adjustment,the other is technological progress.Considering that China is in an important stage of urbanization and industrialization,the effect of structural adjustment on carbon intensity is difficult to see in the short term.At the same time,most research results also show that improving technological progress can be an important starting point for reducing carbon intensity.In this context,technological progress has become an important breakthrough in reducing carbon intensity,transforming economic growth momentum,and achieving sustainable economic development.In view of this,many economists have carried out a series of studies on the relationship between technological progress and carbon intensity,and have achieved many important research results,but there are still many shortcomings.Firstly,most of the research on carbon intensity in China are based on static models,and it is assumed that there is no spatial correlation between regions.Few economists consider the impact of technological progress on carbon intensity from the perspectives of dynamic models,regional differences and spatial spillover effects.At the same time,as an important channel for technological progress,technology spillovers through open channels are also important ways to influence carbon intensity.However,in the traditional empirical research,there exists a general choice of differentiating proxy variables;channel considerations are incomplete and technology absorption capacity is neglected.Based on those,this paper selects China's inter-provincial carbon intensity as the research object.Through the established carbon intensity dynamic adjustment model,the time dimension and spatial dimension information are addly based on the traditional empirical analysis method,and the traditional carbon intensity research method is improved;We also improved the mechanism analysis of the influence of technological progress on carbon intensity,enriched the application of relevant theories of spatial metrology and economics in energy economics.At the same time,considering that industry is a major energy consumption and carbon emission in the past 40 years in China,CO2 emissions from industrial energy consumption accounted for about 70% of the total CO2 emissions from China's total energy consumption.It is the key to the completion of China's overall emission reduction task.This paper then selects China's industrial industry as the research object.Through the construction of the unified technology spillover analysis framework,the problem of differential proxy variables in the carbon intensity of various technology spillover channels is solved.At the same time,the technology absorption capacity is an important factor affecting the carbon intensity of technology spillovers formed by open channels,and the application of technology spillover theory in the field of low carbon economics is expanded.Based on those backgrounds,the main conclusions and recommendations of this paper as follows:This paper takes the influence of technological progress on carbon intensity as the core research content.Firstly,Study the trending of carbon intensity,investigate the convergence of carbon intensity across Chinese provinces,and suggest the existence of stochastic convergence,s-convergence,andb-convergence during the sample period of 2000–2014.Among them,the stochastic convergence and s-convergence mainly are used by statistical test methods.The results show that between 2000 and 2014,China has existed stochastic convergence and s-convergence.The evidence of stochastic convergence suggests that the shock to the time path of carbon intensity for a specific province on China's average level is only transient.As time goes on,the short shocks may disappear,and the provincial carbon intensity would go back to the average level.This significant declining indicates that the absolute disparities of carbon intensity have decreased from 2000 to 2014.For the test ofb-convergence,the conventional b-convergence measurement model is established.The empirical results show that the carbon intensity in China has the characteristic of b-convergence.Among them,the eastern provinces which have the highly carbon intensity declined much faster,while the western provinces which have relatively lower carbon intensity declined more slowly.This shows that in terms of policy formulation,on the one hand,the eastern provinces with highly carbon intensity such as Beijing,Shanghai and Shandong can be continued strictly laws,and on the other hand,the western provinces with low carbon intensity such as Qinghai,Gansu and Xinjiang should be appropriately relaxed.The convergence results indicate that the carbon intensity of each province will remain the same as time passes.In addition,among the factors affecting carbon intensity,technological progress can be one of the main methods to reduce carbon intensity,and the economic structure plays a certain hindrance to the reduction of carbon intensity.Secondly,using the provincial panel data from Year 2000 to Year 2014,the total factor productivity was calculated based on the parameter method as a proxy indicator for its technological progress.Subsequently,the fixed effect model,the Generalized Least Squares model,the Driscoll-Kraay method,the GMM and other methods are used comprehensively.The level of comparison with regional differences examines the impact of technological progress on China's carbon intensity.Subsequently,using static and dynamic spatial econometric models to improve traditional analytical methods,further analysis of the impact of spatial spillover effects of technological progress on China's carbon intensity.The empirical results of static and dynamic models show that the adjustment of China's carbon intensity has strong continuity,and the improvement of technological progress will reduce carbon intensity.Due to China's vast land and vast resources,there are many differences among regions,especially in economic conditions,technological progress levels,financial development environment,and natural resource endowments.This paper divides the china into three regions: the eastern,central and western regions.The research perspective examines the impact of technological progress on carbon intensity.Empirical studies based on the comparison of regional differences in China show that there is a significant difference in the impact of technological progress on carbon intensity between different regions.In the eastern and central regions,improveing technological progress can reduce carbon intensity at a highly significant level of 5%.However,for the western region,improveing technological progress has a limited effect on the reduction of carbon intensity.In terms of effects,technological progress in the eastern region have the most pronounced effect on reducing carbon intensity,with the weakest in the western region.Since China's carbon emission has obviously spatial spillover characteristics,the empirical results based on the spatial panel model show that the change of carbon intensity in China will also be affected by the variation of carbon intensity in neighboring provinces;the spatial effect of technological progress has a greater impact on carbon intensity,even larger than the province's own technological progress on the reduction of carbon intensity.This shows that the empirical conclusions of neglecting spatial effects in the past underestimated the role of technological progress in energy conservation and emission reduction.Next,we focus on the impact of different technological progress sources on industry carbon intensity.Using industry data from Year 2000 to Year 2010,industry data was used to clarify the mechanism of technological progress on industry carbon intensity.Initially,the international technology spillover model was established,and the four source of R&D,Foreign Direct Investment(FDI),import and export were used as technological progress sources,and the mechanism of carbon intensity was analyzed according to the linear regression model.The results of linear analysis show that the R&D has a greater effect on the reduction of carbon intensity than the technology spillover sources generated by trade and FDI.Therefore,consistent with previous literature,R&D is the most important way to improve technological progress and reduce carbon intensity.Under the framework of unified international capital technology spillovers,exports,imports and FDI will generate technological spillovers and thus have an impact on carbon intensity.In the technology spillover channel,the technological spillovers caused by imports and FDI are all conducive to the reduction of carbon intensity.The technology spillover effect from exports has increased carbon intensity,which is inconsistent with expectations.Subsequently,the nonlinear relationship between different technological progress sources and carbon intensity was examined.the level of foreign enterprises and R&D were used as two threshold variables to discuss the impact of technological absorption changes on the relationship of technological progress and carbon intensity.When the level of foreign enterprises is used as the threshold variable,as the level of foreign enterprises increases,the technical spillover caused by FDI and imports will contribute to the reduction of carbon intensity,and the negative technology spillover from the export will also decrease.When the R&D is used as the threshold variable,as R&Dincreases,the positive spillover effect of FDI and imports on industrial carbon intensity will decrease,but will increase the negative technology spillover effect of carbon intensity due to exports.Finally,based on relevant theoretical research and empirical analysis,this paper proposes a series of recommendations for energy conservation and emission reduction.At the same time,the future research is prospected.