Study On The Effects Of Carbon Taxes On The International Competitiveness Of China’s Energy Intensive Industries

Heavy use of fossil fuel emissions to the atmosphere makes greenhouse gasesincrease, leading to global climate change and environmental change, which hasbecome the focus of attention of international community in general environmentalissues. At present, China has replaced the U.S. as the world’s largest emitter of carbondioxide, so it faces the increasing pressure on energy saving and emission reduction.As the research in both the academic field and business field going further.China’s imposition of carbon tax has been put on the agenda of government works. Inthis stage, more attention is paid on the impacts on all kinds of industries brought bythe levy of carbon tax especially on those energy intensive industries of high energyconsumption.This paper focuses on the influences of the levy of carbon tax on energyintensive industries’ international competence so as to alleviate the negative effectsfrom the collection of carbon tax, to smoothly propose the levy of carbon tax, to gainthe anticipated results and to finally assure all industries’ sustainable development onthe bases of rational design of carbon tax and supporting measures.In terms of methodology, it adopts the measures of the combinations of theory ofliterature review and empirical research and of qualitative and quantitative analyses.In terms of the theory of literature review, it summarizes relevant scholars’researches from perspectives of whether to collect carbon tax, design of carbon taxand institutional arrangements, impacts and effects of carbon tax and the internationalcompetitiveness, it then concludes the statuses of all countries’ collections of carbontax and the progress of our nation’s carbon tax levy.After qualitatively analyzing the development situation of the domestic energyintensive industries, the paper exemplifies the petrochemical industry to quantitatively analyze its development speed, intensities of energy consumption and carbonemission and adopts the trade specialization coefficient index to analyze presentinternational competences of the petrochemical industry and its specific industries.In the part of empirical analysis, it exemplifies the domestic petrochemicalindustry and selects the trade data from2003to2012of ten countries including China,America, Germany, Japan and Singapore etc., then adds two new explanatoryvariables:“unit carbon tax” and “carbon productivity” to establish the expandedgravity model. Lastly, it regressively analyzes and compares the differences betweenpredicted values and actual ones in order to illustrate the potential for petrochemicalindustry’s competition.The main conclusions of the paper are as follows: the international competitionof the nation’s petrochemical industry is relatively weak, which even shows a weakertendency and the differences among specific industries within petrochemical industryare quite large; the levy of carbon tax will exert negative influences on thepetrochemical industry to some extent although not that seriously, and in the long runit can promote the upgrade of the industrial structure, consequently the benefitsoutweigh the disadvantages; the domestic petrochemical industry is fairly filled withcompetitive potential.In the last part of the paper, it proposes some policy suggestions to assure thesmooth implementation of the levy of carbon tax and the realization of desired resultsincluding preparing for the early stage of the propaganda work, improving the citizens’acceptance to carbon tax, refining auxiliary fiscal policies and optimizing transferpayment.