The Impact Of International Trade On China’s Industrial Carbon Emissions Since Its Entry Into WTO

Greenhouse gases, especially CO2emissions growth leading to the global warming has been a global consensus, which has caused the human to concern about the sustainable development. Who should take the primary responsibility of greenhouse gas emissions, the products and services producing countries or the consuming countries? Whether international trade will bring the pollution transfer to the developing countries and make them suffer the disaster of environmental degradation when it stimulates economic growth in developing countries? These issues have led to the extensive and heated debates all over the world. Since the reform and opening up in China, China’s economy has undergone continuous high-speed development, and environment pollution problems of china involving carbon emissions are blamed by world environment organizations. With the constant improvement of China’s trade openness, it is worth examining whether China has become the pollution haven and in turn finding out the possible reasons for the phenomenon. Moreover, an important basis for making reasonable trade policies in China can be provided. This paper expounds international trade’s impact on China’s industrial carbon emissions since China’s accession to the WTO (2001-2011) from two aspects. First, by using input-output method we calculate China’s19industries’carbon emissions embodied in import, export and net exports during2001-201land conduct scale and industry structure analysis. Then, Basing on industrial panel data, we test the impacts of energy consumption, per capita output, trade openness, FDI, trade competitive advantages and environmental regulation on CO2emissions. Therefore, in order to develop a low-carbon economy and achieve sustainable development, China should make efforts to transform its trade growth mode, adjust trade structure, improve the quality of FDI and strengthen environmental regulation.