Influencing Factors Analysis On China’s Environmental Total Factor Productivity

During more than thirty years reform and opening up in our country,the economic development have got striking achievements.However,with the rapid growth of the economy,the problems of resource consumption and environmental pollution are becoming more and more severe.The extensive growth pattern cannot able to meet the requirements of sustainable development.Another factor in promoting economic development—Environmental Total Factor Productivity is becoming a new breakthrough point.Environmental Total Factor Productivity requires the economic aggregates increase and environmental pollution reduces.It’s a good measure of the quality of economic growth.The dissertation mainly researched two sides.First,it measured the Environmental Total Factor Productivity.The dissertation applied PM2.5 as the undesirable output to estimate the Environmental Total Factor Productivity(ETFP)of China,based on Malmquist-Luenberger productivity index and Inter-Temporal Data Envelopment Analysis.Figured out its spatial distribution and calculated the gravity centers,the dissertation analyzed the change of ETFP.The dissertation decomposed ETFP into technology change and technical efficiency to explore their impact on ETFP.Second,the dissertation analyzed the reasons for the difference of ETFP in different provinces by spatial econometric model.The dependent variables included economic development,industrial structure,research and development funds,human capital,foreign direct investment and energy consumption.At last,the dissertation made some suggestions for the controlling of the pollution and improvement of the Environmental Total Factor Productivity based on the actual situation of our country and foreign experience.The dissertation reached some conclusions:(1)The result of China’s Environmental Total Factor Productivity.The ETFP index,technology change index and technical efficiency index of the whole country are less than 1.In stark contrast to the high speed growth of China’s economy,which indicates the improvement of the economy was driven by the increase in factor inputs.With the rapid growth of the economy,the problem of resource consumption and environmental pollution is becoming more and more severe.The serious restraint of the natural resources makes the extensive style of economic growth hard to be carried on.The ETFP of east,northeast,Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang were higher than the middle and west area.(2)The level of economic development and foreign direct investment had positive impacts on ETFP,industrial structure,research and development funds,human capital and energy consumption had slight negative impacts on ETFP.The results did not support "pollution heaven" hypothesis and environmental Kuznets curve watts.The change of industrial structure in neighboring region had positive impacts on ETFP,research and development funds and human capital worked the other way around.The dissertation shows its innovation on three points.First,the Environmental Total Factor Productivity is an index of considering environment factor,which means the environmental pollution indicators should reflect the level of environmental pollution.The reason why the dissertation took PM2.5 as the undesirable output is that PM2.5 contains more pollutants.Second,the existing researches did not take the spatial correlation of ETFP into consideration,which will lead to the results of the study existing deviation.This dissertation avoids this problem.Third,in this dissertation,the empirical results were compared with the existing literature,and found that research and development funds and human capital had different impacts on ETFP compared with most literatures.