Analyzing The Impact Of Export Trade On CO₂Emissions In China

Global climate change has become one of the most serious environmental problems whichhuman beings should to face. At present, China is the largest CO2emitter in the world. Theimplementation of energy-saving and emission reduction is not only the inherent requirement ofachieving sustainable development in China, also, as the largest developing country, China shouldtake the initiative to assume this international responsibility.Although the rapid growth of CO2emissions in china is related to its historical mode ofeconomic growth, we should consider the metastatic emissions bring by current export trade.Therefore, we take the environmental effects as theoretical basis, introduce factor decompositionanalysis to calculate the impact of export trade of16industrial sectors on CO2emissions from scaleeffect, structural effect, and technical effect in china, find that from year1995to2009, the exporttrade of industrial sectors in china bring the CO2emissions significant positive structural effect,technical effect and negative scale effect. In15years, the structure and technological change ofindustrial export respectively reduce CO2emissions1445.75tons and4564.86tons. While scaleincreases bring the raise of CO2emissions to18115.24tons. Scale negative effect caused by theindustrial exports is greatly larger than structural and technical positive effect. So the total effect isnegative and the industrial exports lead to CO2emissions increasing of12104.63tons.Furthermore, we use panel data model to investigate the impact of28provinces’ exports onCO2emissions from three perspectives in china, find that there are16provinces’ exports have asignificant influence on CO2emissions, and all of them show the negative scale effect, illustratethat a considerable part of CO2emissions is from exports in China, it’s transfer emissions. From theper capita income, it is closely related to CO2emissions in16provinces. Beijing, Zhejiang andShanghai demonstrate the positive scale effect, but the improvement of people’s living standardwill increase CO2emissions in other13provinces. Structural effect is also obvious, as much as20provinces in China explain that their current economic structure is not conducive to the reductionof CO2emissions. Finally, the energy intensity is related to CO2emissions in20provinces also,and all of them show obvious positive technical effect.Given the empirical results of industries and regions, this paper finally put forward thefollowing policy suggestions: first, change the structure of energy consumption, improve energyefficiency; second, optimize the industrial structure, reasonable regional layout; third, improve thestructure of imports and exports; fourth, strengthen the functions of the government, raise people’sawareness of environmental protection.