An Empirical Study On The Impact Of The "One Belt And Road" Initiative On China's CO2 Emissions

With the global warming,reducing carbon emissions is the requirement of the times.In 2013,the Chinese government put forward the Belt and Road Initiative and emphasized that the initiative not only focuses on economic development,but also pays attention to environmental protection.Since the implementation of this initiative,scholars have analyzed its effect on the economy,but ignored its effect on the environment.This makes it very hard for the government to understand the effect of the initiative fully.In view of this,this article tries to study the effect of the Belt and Road Initiative on China's carbon emissions via technological progress.This article explores the mechanism by which the Belt and Road Initiative affects carbon emissions through technological progress.Firstly,we combine the five aspects of the Belt and Road Initiative with the existing literatures to find that the initiative can promote the technological progress by optimizing the factor markets,strengthening the transportation infrastructure,promoting the trade and investment liberalization,and promoting the financial development and cultural exchanges,so we make the Hypothesis 1: The Belt and Road Initiative can promote the technological progress of China.Then we improve the green Solow model(GSM)to the technology-related green Solow model(TIGSM),which is used to analyze the effect of technological progress on carbon emissions.Based on the TIGSM,we propose Hypothesis 2: technological progress can reduce the carbon emissions in China.Finally,we combine Hypothesis 1 and Hypothesis 2 to obtain the path of the Belt and Road Initiative affects carbon emissions through technological progress,and proposes Hypothesis 3: The Belt and Road Initiative can reduce China's carbon emissions by technological progress.This article uses SBM-GM,HCW,DSDM,ARDL and other econometric models in its empirical research.We use Solow residual value and SBM-GM to measure China's total factor productivity from the national and provincial perspective respectively.Then,we propose the HCW with higher-order terms to analyze the effect of the Belt and Road Initiative on China's technological progress from both the national and provincial perspectives,and the superiority of the new method has been proved.After that,this article uses the ARDL model to analyze the effect of technological progress on China's carbon emissions from the national perspective,and uses DSDM to analyze the effect of technological progress and its components on China's carbon emissions from the provincial perspective.Finally,this article uses the model of Wen and Ye(2014)to determine whether the Belt and Road Initiative can reduce China's carbon emissions by technological progress.This article has three main conclusions.First,the Belt and Road Initiative has improved China's technological level.The Belt and Road Initiative can promote China's technological progress by optimizing the factor markets,strengthening the transportation infrastructure,promoting the trade and investment liberalization,and promoting the financial development and cultural exchanges.By the HCW with high-order items,this article find that the Belt and Road Initiative increases China's technology level by 5.6% and 0.24% in terms of the national and provincial perspective respectively.After decomposing technological progress into technological change(TC),pure efficiency change(PEC)and scale efficiency change(SEC),this paper finds that the Belt and Road Initiative improves China's TC and SEC,but decreases the PEC.In addition,the effect of the Belt and Road Initiative on SEC is bigger than that on TC and PEC.Second,technological progress can reduce China's carbon emissions.Based on the TIGSM,this paper find that technological progress has both positive and negative effects on carbon emissions.When people's environmental awareness is strong and the production technology can be easily transformed into environmental protection technology,the negative effect of technological progress on carbon emissions is greater than the positive effect,so the technology progress can reduce carbon emissions.The empirical result at the national level based on the ARDL model shows that technological progress has reduced carbon emissions by 12.8%,and the empirical result at the provincial level based on the DSDM model has obtained similar result.In addition,the empirical results at the provincial level show that the effect of EC is greater than that of TC,and the effect of SEC is greater than that of PEC.Technological progress in a province can reduce carbon emissions in its neighboring provinces.The spatial spillover effect of technology progress on carbon emissions is greater than its direct effect.Third,the Belt and Road Initiative can reduce China's carbon emissions via technological progress.Through the model of Wen and Ye(2014),this paper finds that technological progress is indeed an intermediate channel for the Belt and Road Initiative to affect carbon emissions.The empirical analysis results at the national level show that the amount of carbon emissions that Belt and Road Initiative reduce through technological progress is 0.71%,and the results at the provincial level show that the One Belt One Road Initiative has reduced carbon emissions by 1.13% through technological progress.The conclusions of this paper imply that the Belt and Road Initiative can satisfy China's demand to have a green development and an innovative economy.According to the conclusions of this article,the government can improve the technical level by strengthening communication between China and countries along the route,promoting infrastructure construction in areas along the route,improving the international trade and investment environment,and promoting financial development and multicultural exchanges in areas along the route.In addition,promoting technological progress is an effective way to achieve a sustainable development in China.In order to expand the emission reduction effect of technological progress,the government can use education,taxation,fines and other means to enhance the environmental awareness of people and can encourage enterprises to focus on the interactive between production technology and environmental protection technology.The link between the provinces can be strengthened by building high-speed rails,building high-speed trains,and improving transportation service levels.The government should encourage independent innovation and encourage enterprises to learn and introduce advanced production technologies.This paper makes three marginal contributions.First,the existing literature pays less attention to the effect of the Belt and Road Initiative on the environment,and there are little studies on the effect of the initiative on carbon emissions through technology progress.This research makes up for this shortcoming and verifies the mechanism that the initiative influences technological progress and thus carbon emissions.Second,this paper proposes TIGSM based on GSM,which provides a reference for scholars to further study the mechanism between technological progress and carbon emissions.In addition,this article also analyzes the mechanism that the Belt and Road Initiative affects technological progress,and combines this mechanism with the TIGSM to obtain a complete path for the Belt and Road Initiative to affect carbon emissions through technological progress.Third,this article proposes HCW with high-order items,which is a new method to estimate the average treatment effect and this new method can serves as a better way for scholars to study the effect of a policy such as the Belt and Road Initiative.