The Impact Of Manufacturing Industry Agglomeration On Carbon Emissions From The Perspective Of New Economic Geography

Since reform and opening-up,the agglomeration trend of manufacturing industry has become increasingly prominent.Traditional agglomeration economic theory holds that manufacturing agglomeration,as an important driving force of China's economic transformation,plays a positive role in promoting economic development through economies of scale and spillover effects.Just like the two sides of a coin,the agglomeration of manufacturing also brings a series of environmental issues such as excessive consumption of regional resources and the substantial increase in carbon emissions.Under the realistic background of tightening carbon emission constraints,it is necessary to explore the relationship between manufacturing agglomeration and carbon emissions in order to achieve maximum output benefits in the given carbon emission space.On the other hand,it is also an answer to the future development path of manufacturing industry,which is either intensive or decentralized.In real life,the agglomeration of manufacturing industry effectively improves factor productivity and accelerates the adjustment of industrial structure.Academic circles also start with the positive externality of agglomeration.Does manufacturing agglomeration also have positive externalities in energy saving and emission reduction?In other words,is there a co-directional correlation between manufacturing agglomeration and carbon emission levels?This paper reviews the existing literature on manufacturing agglomeration and carbon emission levels,and finds that the existing research has not reached a consistent conclusion.This study calculates the level of urban carbon emission and the agglomeration index of manufacturing industry in view of China Urban Statistical Yearbook and China Industrial Enterprise Database.On the basis of STRIP AT theory model,we constructed a spatial econometric model to explored the mechanism of the effects of urban agglomeration economies on carbon emissions based on the panel data of 273 prefecture level and above cities from 2003-2013 in China.Empirical results show that,from the total sample,the increase of manufacturing agglomeration makes the regional carbon emissions increase significantly,which does not produce the theoretical expected carbon emission reduction effect,but can significantly reduce the carbon emission level of the adjacent space units through the spatial spillover effect.And the indirect effect is far greater than the direct effect.Strengthening the governance of joint emission reduction among cities and promoting the rational allocation of resources among cities are effective ways to promote energy conservation and emission reduction.From the perspective of urban scale,there is coupling between urban scale and industrial agglomeration to a certain extent.Industrial agglomeration has different carbon emission effects for cities of different sizes.Specifically,in small cities,the technological level of agglomeration enterprises is at a low stage,and the negative externalities brought by agglomeration will conceal the positive externalities.In medium-sized cities,agglomeration has a restraining effect on carbon emissions to a certain extent,but the effect is not obvious.n large cities with a non-agricultural population of more than 1 million,the effect of carbon emission reduction is the best because of the superiority of talent level,technological level,enterprise competitiveness,government supervision and other aspects to small and medium cities.The possible innovation of this paper is unlike previous descriptions of economic agglomeration level based on aggregate data,according to the industry code conversion table and the region code conversion table,this paper matched the three information of the location of the enterprise,the classification of the national economy industry of the enterprise and the number of employees of the enterprise and then constructed agglomeration index at prefectural and municipal level.Secondly,this paper took into account the existence of inter-regional spillover effects and established a spatial econometric model.According to the number of non-agricultural population in the urban area,the paper divides the city into small scale city,medium scale city and big city,and explored the impact of manufacturing agglomeration on carbon emissions under different scale cities.