The Empirical Research On The Factors Of The Carbon Emission In Yangtze River Delta Based On Breitung’s Panel Co-integration Method

The economy of China has grown speedily after the Reform and Opening-up. While its leading industry has also changed regularly and fast, from the Agriculture Produce which was represented by the family position of contract responsibility system in the early80’s, to the Light Industry which was represented by the town and township enterprises in the late80’s, and then to the Heavy Industry that some regions of China have taken up formally after the end of90’s. In this period, as well as the increasing of national income and the acceleration of urbanization, cars and residences became the common commodity, which lead to the rapid growth of the demand in products like steel, cement and cokes. As a result, the mass output of these products would bring about the heavy pressure to our environment. Meanwhile, the experience of the developmental country told that the vigorous development in Heavy Industry leads to the most serious environmental pollution and ecological destruction.This paper tries to discuss the influence from the energy consumption and the industrialization to the carbon emission in the Yangtze River Delta Region. To deal with the main problems in this study, including the unstable panel data and the close correlation between the economic units, I use the technique of panel co-integration and fully consider the contemporaneous correlation in the experience model. Actually, this paper includes three techniques in empirical model:(1) Use the method of contemporaneous correlate panel unit root testing to distinguish the random trend in the economic variables.(2) Apply Breitung’s panel co-integrated method in the consideration of contemporaneous correlation to deal with the long term equilibrium that might exit between those economic variables and to estimate and test for the co-integrated vector.(3) Make the use of the panel Granger causally testing to research the factors of carbon emission. The application of above three techniques makes it available to get the long term equilibrium of carbon emission and to analyze the factors in long and short term.The main conclusions of this paper are as follows:(1) In the Yangtze River Delta Region there exit only one co-integrated relation between per capita carbon emission, per capita energy consumption and the rate of gross industrial production. Furthermore, the rate of gross industrial production and the per capita energy consumption have a positive effect to the per capita carbon emission.(2) There is a Granger causal relation from the per capita energy consumption to the per capita carbon emission in long term, and a Granger causal relation from the rate of gross industrial production to per capita carbon emission in short term.(3) With the above conclusions, this paper applies the theories of regional economy and development stage to forecast trend of carbon emission. And we find that the per capita carbon emission of Shanghai will decrease in a certain period of the future, however the per capita carbon emission of Zhejiang and Jiangsu will increase in a certain period of the future.Additionally, concerning the empirical study, this paper extends the using of the co-integrated method from time series to the contemporaneous correlate panel date, including the unit root test, the estimation and test for the co-integrated vector and the Granger causal test.