International Trade, FDI (foreign Direct Investment) And The Implied CO ₂ Emissions

Economic growth has been accompanied by environmental problems had attracted wide attention worldly. Who should take the responsibility of greenhouse gas emissions system become the focus of debate. In the past, to determine a country’s emission are all on the point of responsibility for production, however, a large proportion of China’s pollution is not produced to meet domestic consumption and emissions, but by foreign demand for exports to meet the emissions produced. From the respective of consumer responsibility to consider the issue of global pollution emissions in China will greatly reduce liability. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA) statistics, the global CO2emissions reported a record of31600Mt in2011, Chinese CO2emitted largest and accounted for26.9%of global emissions. Of which about70%of the total emissions are the industrial emissions, due to the coal-dominated energy consumption structure, China’s industrial sector is still the main source of the pressure of carbon emissions.Firstly, based on the theory of opening and environmental pollution, this paper calculates the CO2emissions embodied in China’s international trade using an input-output analysis for the period2000-2010. And analyzing the characteristics of the embodied carbon in China’s foreign trade, from the CO2emissions coefficient, exported carbon and imported carbon three angles. Meanwhile, we expounded the imbalance reasons for embodied carbon in China’s foreign trade. Then, in order to verify the "pollution haven hypothesis" and the "environmental Kuznets curve" theory, we established the embodied carbon and FDI regression model, to test the impact of FDI, trade openness, exports, imports and per capita income on CO2emissions, using the two-Step GMM estimation, Random-effects GLS regresstion and Pooled OLS regresstion.Finally, the research results support the two theories, including:(1) China’s growing trade surplus is one of the important reasons for the rapidly growing CO2emissions.(2) The ’carbon transfer’ from developed countries led to the rapid growth of China’s CO2emissions.(3) The irrational structure of China’s industries also contributed to the reasons.(4) Large FDI inflows further aggravate China’s CO2emissions.(5) The industrial sector’s per capita income and CO2emissions show inverted-U environmental Kuznets curve. Therefore, in order to achieve the sustainable development of social economy and ecological environment, China should take efforts to transform trade growth mode, adjust foreign investment structure, strengthen energy efficiency, and develop low-carbon economy.