| Climate change is the most serious global environmental problem in the twenty-first century, tackling climate change and reducing carbon emissions have become the consensus of international community. In order to achieve carbon reduction and sustainable economic development, it is necessary to increase the carbon productivity in each region. Technological progress is a key factor to deal with carbon reduction and climate change. Therefore, it makes sense to give full play to drive the effects of regional technological progress on carbon emissions. The paper is to study the influence of technology progress on carbon productivity and clarify regional differences.Firstly, the situation of energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions in China is described, and then technological progress in East, Middle and West of China is estimated respectively, the simulation is based on the state space model containing time-varying parameter. Meanwhile, the regional carbon productivity is calculated according to GDP and CO2 emissions. Based on the above analysis, the relations between two types of technical progress and the regional carbon productivity are studied through gray correlation analysis method. Besides, error correction model is applied to analyze the regional long-term and short-term impact of technological advances on carbon productivity. In addition, the dynamic effects and contribution rate of each other are analyzed based on vector auto-regression model. Finally, suggestions to the main problems are put forward based on the results of the empirical in this paper.The main conclusions are as follows:(1) 1995-2012, China’s overall and regional energy consumption shows a steady upward trend year by year. The energy consumption is decreasing from East to West. CO2 emissions in East is significantly higher than that in Middle, and the emission in Middle is higher than West at beginning. But with the increasing acceleration of carbon emissions in West, the gap between Middle and West is narrowing gradually, and it also shows that the West has caught up with the Middle in 2012.(2) Technical progress’ s average growth rate of China’s eastern, central and western regions are descending, they are 8.09%, 6.61% and 4.84% respectively. Among them, the average growth rate of the embodied technological progress of three regions followed by 5.12%, 4.48% and 3.81%; the average growth rate of non-embodied technological progress followed by 2.97%, 2.13% and 1.03%. Technological progress of the regions is mainly capital embodied technological progress.(3) It can be seen from regional differences of the carbon productivity that the East of carbon productivity is much higher than the Middle and the West. The comparison results between East and West show that the Middle gradually surpassed the West since 2003 and the gap was enlarging. Changes in carbon productivity of each region can be divided into three stages. The carbon productivity in East from 1995 to 2003 was rising, and it declined between 2004 and 2005, and it reappeared rising between 2006 and 2012; Carbon productivity in Middle showed a rising, declining, and a new round of increase trend respectively in 1995-2001, 2002-2005 and 2006-2012; it appeared rise, fall and a new round of rise respectively in 1995-2001, 2002-2006 and 2007-2012 in West.(4) A grey correlation analysis method that is studied on the relationships between two types of technological progress and carbon productivity. The results shows that the grey related degree between non-embodied technical progress and carbon productivity is higher in all regions, which indicates that the non-embodied technological progress represented by R&D and innovation has a greater impact on the carbon productivity.(5) In the long run, it raises the level of carbon productivity no matter what the type of technological progress is. Besides, the impact is diminishing from the east to the west. In the short term, the impact of the various regions of the two types of technological progress carbon productivity is different: it is ubiquitous that the capital embodied technological progress would reduce the carbon productivity of this situation in regions; non-embodied technological progress on carbon productivity effects varied in each region, which reflects that non-embodied technology progress has improving the carbon productivity in East and West. However, in Middle, non-embodied technological progress has reduced the carbon productivity in the short term. Delays from the impact, the response of the regional carbon productivity reflected the impact of the type of technological progress are negative in the beginning, and a fever weeks later, it turned to positive,which reflects the impact of capital embodied technological progress on carbon productivity has a certain time-lag. While the regional variance decomposition of carbon productivity reflects that the contribution rate of capital embodied technological progress was higher than non-embodied technological progress. |
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