The Analysis Of The Factors Influencing Carbon Emissions In The View Of Chinese Fiscal Decentralization

In recent years, with the growing global warming effect, all the countries have given a high degree of concern on the climate change. Carbon emissions has become a hot issue,and countries began to seek a clean and new development model actively. In2003, the "low carbon economy" first appeared in the official documents of the UK Energy White Paper, which indicated the coming era of low-carbon economy. Low-carbon economy is essentially a question of development. The process of diverting to a low carbon country is actually the process of the separation of greenhouse gas emissions and economic growth. Nowadays,there are a lot of researches, which have discussed the issue of carbon emissions in the view of economy development, industry,and foreign direct investment. In fact, Chinese rapid economic development is inseparable from China’s institution building, especially the Chinese fiscal decentralization institution, which greatly mobilized the initiative of local government. There are lots of researches to announce that the Chinese fiscal decentralization has played a huge role in the development of Chinese economy. However, the Chinese fiscal decentralization system is under the political centralization, which means that the central government has a certain decision-making power on the local government. This mechanism led to the " GDP Theory of local government" to some extent. The local government always pursuit the rapid economic development regardless of the environmental pollution. Although the high consumption, high pollution, high emission and low efficiency development mode leads to the rapid development of GDP, it seriously pollutes our current environment, which is contrary to the requirements of our political, economic, cultural, social and ecological civilization construction.This article has a research on issue of carbon emissions, which adversely affects the global development and is not conducive to China’s ecological environment construction. Firstly, we analyze the affecting factor of China’s per capita carbon emissions by the LMDI decomposition method, finding that the per capita GDP is the main pulling factor of the per capita carbon emissions, and energy structure and efficiency suppress the increase of carbon emissions. Secondly, this paper theoretically analyzes the influence of Chinese fiscal decentralization on our carbon emissions in the view of Principal-agent Theory and Public choice theory. From Principal-agent theory view, Chinese fiscal decentralization affects the behavior of local government through the political incentives, economic incentives and personal income incentives, which makes the local government focuses on the capital-driven economic development model and ignores the protection of environment. From Public choice theory, low carbon emissions can be regarded as national public goods, which have a strong positive externalities. Chinese fiscal decentralization causes a game between central government and local government. The dominant strategy of local government is no carbon reduction under the influence of spillover of public goods, leading to high carbon emissions. Therefore, Chinese fiscal decentralization promotes China’s carbon emissions in theory, which is not conductive to the green and sustainable economic development mode.This paper uses panel data to further verify the rationality of the transmission mechanism on the influence of Chinese fiscal decentralization on our per capita carbon emissions. Firstly, this paper carries out Granger causality test between economic development and per capita carbon emissions to conclude that the economic development is the Granger cause of per capita carbon emissions. Secondly, we discussed the influence of Chinese fiscal decentralization on per capita carbon emissions from both he static and dynamic aspects. We conclude that Chinese fiscal decentralization has a significant positive effect on the per capita carbon emissions, and the relationship of per capita GDP and per capita carbon emissions conforms to the EKC hypothesis whether from a static or dynamic mode. As for the control variables, both the foreign investment and energy structure has a positive correlation on per capita carbon emissions. The difference is that industrialization level shows a positive effect on per capita carbon emissions in the static model, which is showed little effect in the dynamic model. The education level shows a significant negative corelation in the static model, while promotes the per capita carbon emissions in the dynamic model.The empirical results reveal that we can optimize energy structure,improve energy efficiency by technological innovation, accelerate industrial upgrading, improve local government evaluation mechanism under the Chinese fiscal decentralization, support low-carbon economy development, cultivate low-carbon living habits and so on.In short, the fact that China’s carbon emissions is in the growing remains, and the Chinese fiscal decentralization system has a positive impact on China’s carbon emissions. In the coming institution building, we should clear the responsibility between the central and local government under Chinese fiscal decentralization in order to establish the government authority and financial power matching system, which adds the ecological environmental protection.In the public sector, we should foster the low-carbon awareness of residents, combine both the government and the masses supervision to control the development of high-carbon emissions enterprises. Gradually, we should change the development model from treatment after pollution model to green and sustainable economic model.