The Influence Of Trade Openness And Urbanization On China’s Carbon Dioxide Emissions

Global climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions has become the focus of national attention. United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) released Carbon Emissions Gap Report in 2013, declaring that global greenhouse gas emissions can’t be more than 44 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalents per year up to 2020. Even if all countries comply with commitments, there are still gaps compared with the goal. Along with the improvement of trade liberalization and the advancement of urbanization, Chinese economy has a fast growth speed. But environmental problems gradually occur, becoming the world’s largest emitter of CO2. The Central Work Conference of Urbanization was held in December 2013. It calls for improving energy efficiency and reducing energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions intensity while the development quality of urbanization improves. China eastern zone has developed foreign trade, rapid urbanization and industrialization process by use of advantageous location. However, the carrying capacity of environment and pollution problems have also appeared, Bo Hai Coastal region, Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta are not only three major metropolitan areas of the higher pollution emissions, but also have a contradiction between eco-environment and urban contradiction.Based on the above background and situation, the analysis of the paper contains trade liberalization, urbanization and carbon emissions in the eastern region. Theoretically, it focuses on the environmental effects of trade liberalization, carbon emissions effects of urbanization and interaction between trade liberalization and urbanization; statistically, this paper makes overview and descriptive statistics about eastern openness to trade, urbanization and carbon emissions, sum-marizing calculation method of carbon emissions; on empirical methods, STIRPAT econometric model is foundation. Effects of trade openness and the urbanization on carbon emissions are examined by the fixed effect; the interaction impact between trade openness and urbanization on carbon emissions is researched by using a three-stage least squares (3SLS).According to empirical results based on panel data, the continuous promotion of eastern urbanization increases carbon emissions, while the rising foreign trade dependency reduces carbon emissions. However, the interaction impact between trade openness and urbanization makes eastern carbon emissions show a downward trend. In addition, trade openness and urbanization in eastern China show complementary relationship. In particular, urbanization on promoting role of trade openness is greater than trade openness on promoting role of urbanization. Thus, the eastern China should actively improve trade commodity structure, develop low-carbon trade industry and take the road of a low-carbon economy. At the same time, it needs to improve the quality of urbanization, promote the transformation and upgrading of industrial structure, and dredge transmission channels and mechanism between urbanization and trade openness.