Environmental Policy, Carbon Emission Reduction Efficiency And China’s Trade Competitiveness

Now international trade is developing rapidly, however, the rapid growth of trade also draws an environment problem, especially the emissions of greenhouse gases. In order to deal with this problem, most of countries have started to raise the level of environmental regulation. Since China joined the world trade organization (WTO) in 2001, foreign trade has been growing at an alarming rate. By 2012, China surpassed the United States to become the first trading power. During the same period, China’s carbon dioxide emissions are also increasing rapidly, by 2009 have surpassed US to become the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide. Therefore, there is a certain relationship between the development of China’s foreign trade and carbon dioxide emissions. Could the increasingly strict international carbon reduction policy influence the development of China’s foreign trade? As the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide, China will face huge pressure to reduce carbon emissions. So to study the impact about carbon emissions of environmental policy on China’s trade competitiveness has very important practical significance.Under the background of global value chain division, trade competitiveness depends mainly on the advantage of enterprise cost and product differentiation. Firstly, this paper reviewed the related research of domestic and foreign scholars. Then on the basis of the summary, this paper introduced the impact mechanism of strict carbon emission policy on China’s trade competitiveness. This problem is analyzed respectively from the perspective of costs and differentiation. According to the results:from the perspective of the cost, strict environmental policies from the environmental governance costs, transportation costs and carbon tariff costs directly affect the enterprise cost, and can also from the effect of technology, industrial structure optimization and industrial location choice indirectly affect the enterprise cost; From the perspective of the differentiation, strict environmental policies can from the concept of environmental protection, technical effect and product innovation compensation to influence the differentiation of the products. Finally, impact on the trade competitiveness depends on the comprehensive results.Based on the theoretical analysis, this paper uses the total factor C02 emission efficiency to construct an econometric model to analyze the influence of the carbon emissions policy on trade competitiveness. The main conclusions as follows:first, from the regression results on whole industry, total factor efficiency of C02 emission reduction does have significant negative effects on trade competitiveness, China is in the "threat" area of environment-competitive matrix, so strict policies to reduce emissions would reduce China’s overall trade competitiveness. Second, for the group of low R&D strength, total factor C02 emission reduction efficiency still has a significant negative effect, but for the group of high R&D strength has a positive promoting effect. This shows that the improvement of R&D has changed the direction of carbon reduction policy impact on trade competitiveness, make relevant industries directly jump from the "threat" to "opportunity" areas. Third, total factor C02 emission reduction efficiency of labor-intensive industry still has a negative effect, but the negative effects of capital-intensive industries is not significant. This shows that the increase in per capita capital reduces the weaken effect of carbon reduction policy on trade competitiveness, make relevant industries move from "threat" to "original state" area. Finally, this paper based on the above conclusions, this paper puts forward several policy suggestions.