Provincial Green Total Factor Productivity And Spatial Effects Of China’s Industry

The economy of our country has obtained giant leap of development, and the people’s livingstandard have acquired significantly improved since the policy of reform and opening-up to theworld was enacted in1978. However, the inefficiency use of natural resources has incurred lots ofenvironment issues during the rapid economic growth period. Our policy makers have to weigh botheconomic growth and energy saving and emission reduction. Confronting the fact that the scarcityof resources, the serious pollution of environment and the degeneration of ecological system, the18th national people’s congress systematically and theoretically proposed the strategic task ofconstructing ecological civilization which aims to the sustainable development of economy, andachieve the harmonious development of human and nature. The objective evaluation of economicgrowth is particularly important under the background of high-speed development of economy andgrowing environmental pollution.This paper firstly acquires the necessity of accurate measurement of the quality of our country’seconomic growth by analyzing both the economic development and the harmonious operation ofthe society. Secondly, evaluating the30provincial units’ environmental efficiency during the yearof1998-2011comprehensively by means of traditional measurement of environmental efficiency.We get the conclusion that there exist gaps in the level of economic development and the degree ofsociety harmony between the developing areas and the developed areas, therefore the developmentof our country is unbalanced. Thus we get an overall view of the economic quality of our country.Thirdly, we compute the Total Productivity Factor by analyzing the Malmquist productivity (M)index which exclude unwanted output and the Malmquist-Luenberger productivity (ML) indexwhich include unwanted output, and we get the conclusion that the former overall higher than thelatter, which proves the M productivity index which discard unwanted output over-estimate theincrease of our country’total factor productivity. We also obtain that Technical Change is the sourceof the improvement of the Total Productivity Factor. Thus we get a more precise comprehension ofthe quality of our country’ economy. Finally, by selecting ML productivity index as the dependentvariable and Real GDP per capita, the share of the foreign investment, the industrial structure of the region, the investment on environmental control, the fixed capital investment and the consumptionof fossil energy as the independent variable and adopting spatial econometric measurement, we findthere exist spatial correlation between neighboring districts’ ML productivity index. We also givethe relative Moran scatter diagrams. Real GDP per capita and the fixed capital investment havepositive effects on ML productivity index, whereas the share of the foreign investment, the industrialstructure of the region and the consumption of fossil energy have negative effects on MLproductivity index. The influence of the investment on environmental control is not significant.Finally, the paper gives comprehensive analyses depend on the results obtained previously, andalso gives some advices to the policy makers. In order to acquire higher quality of economic growthand shift the model of the economic development from extensive economy to technology-intensiveeconomy.