Green Total Factor Productivity Growth、Carbon Dioxide Emission Reduction And Sustainable Economic Development In China

Since the reform and opening up, China’s economic growth has averaged more than 8 percent per year, becoming one of the countries with fastest growth, called"Chinese Miracle". Such a fast economic growth is because of the overstepping strategy which is mainly concerned about the heavy industry manufacture and the urban-rural dual economic system and institutional arrangement of"subsidy from agriculture to industry", i.e. the high increase of industry, based on this strategy. In other words, the fast economic growth of China, to a large extent, is the result of industry growth. However, the extensive feature of high energy consumption in industry and high pollution emissions in China inevitably leads to large amount of energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, resulting in the huge environmental pressure in economic sustainable development. Nevertheless, the urbanization and industrialization still need to be promoted steadily and urgently. Energy and heavy industry with intensive pollution are also indispensible. What’s more, the contradiction among economic development, energy consumption and environment pollution has become more and more obvious.Severe environment pressure makes the significance of total factor productivity(TFP) clearly, i.e. residual, the extra productivity obtained under the condition that the input of all produce and environmental factors are controlled. This kind of productivity growth is related to the optimization of technology advance to enterprise production function and institution reform to resource allocation rather than the input factors, such as labor and energy consumption. Under the background above, the research of green total factor growth and its driving force is really significant to China’s economic sustainable development. In this paper, I will investigate the problem of economic sustainable development from the perspective of TFP by putting energy consumption and carbon dioxide emission into the economic model. This method is actually an observation and judgment of the economic growth model and its path from a new angle. Based on the green total factor productivity(GTFP) and its growth, the research questions in this paper are as follows:①How is the efficiency of GTFP in China in a certain past period? And what are the driving forces?②How is the growth of GTFP in China in a certain past period? And what are the driving forces?Just as mentioned above, both the two questions include not only the judgment of China’s region economic growth model, the analysis of driving forces but the focus of changing way of economic growth and achieving sustainable development. Therefore, it’s the logic foundation to propose relative policy suggestions. Besides, as the limited input of resource factor, environmental capacity plays an important role in the sustainable development of China. As the dual proposition of "certain input of environmental factors accomplishes the biggest output", "the least emission under certain output" is also the question what I focus on. Therefore, in this paper, I use the econometric model to study the driving force of the total emission of carbon dioxide in China and make a basic explanation.The empirical results of this paper are as follows:①The promotion of urbanization is the biggest driving force of the constant increase of carbon dioxide emission. Although the total emission of carbon dioxide increased all the time, the intensity of carbon dioxide and energy decreased, with the gradually increasing environmental pressure.②Environmental factor seems to have a negative effect on the output growth in China, which is more obvious in the east part than its west counterpart.③The GTFP and its growth increase steadily. The driving force of China’s economic growth has been changed from the input of capital, labor, energy and the environmental capacity factors, mainly carbon dioxide emission to the sustainable GTFP.④Further empirical study indicates that the input of education and independent research and development, the optimization of industrial structure and the market reform can positively promote the growth of GTFP. The investment from foreign companies, however, has make China become "the shelter of pollution".