Carbon Emission Performance Of Industrial Sectors In Northern China From The Region-sector Perspective

As the largest emitter of carbon dioxide?CO₂?in the world,China has the responsibility and obligation to control greenhouse gas emissions and promote low-carbon transformation.Thus,the Chinese government has accordingly proposed a series of measures to achieve a low-carbon economy.Due to the low carbon emission performance?CEP?and the high industry portion of the northern provinces in China,evaluating the CEP of industrial sectors in northern China is necessary.By considering the different CEP assessments in regional and industrial research,a dual-perspective assessment of CEP was presented to narrow the gap between the regional and industrial perspectives.The main contents of this article are as follows:First,the CEP was measured from the regional perspective.In this paper,we adopted the dual model of slack-based measure?SBM?and data envelopment analysis?DEA?to measure the CEP of the industrial sectors from 2006 to 2015 in Jilin,Heilongjiang,Inner Mongolia,Gansu,Ningxia,and Xinjiang.Based on the SBM DEA method,we calculated the values and rankings of CEP of industrial sectors in each province.The results show that there are differences in the CEP ranking of 22 industrial sectors in each province.The average value of CEP of 22 industrial sectors in Gansu is the highest,while the overall difference is the lowest.Moreover,the CEP of industrial sectors in the northeast and northwest China has a spatial clustering phenomenon.Second,the CEP was measured from the industrial perspective.Due to the low developed level of industry in six provinces,the top one of the six same industrial sectors might be with the lower CEP in reality.Aiming to avoid the theoretical results from the industrial perspective,we took Beijing as the high level of industries and Liaoning as the average level into the industrial-scale research.Therefore,we adopted SBM DEA model and the global Malmquist–Luenberger index?GMLI?to measure the static and dynamic CEP of the same industrial sectors among eight provinces including Jilin,Heilongjiang,Inner Mongolia,Gansu,Ningxia,Xinjiang,Beijing,and Liaoning from 2006 to 2015.To explore the driver of change of CEP,we decomposed the value of GMLI into efficiency change?EC?and best practice gap change?BPC?components.The results show that most of the industrial sectors in the production frontier are in Inner Mongolia.In addition,most industrial sectors in the eight regions showed an ascent in CEP,and the change in the CEP value was mainly driven by EC.Third,the CEP was analyzed from the dual-perspective of the region-sector.A comparison of the results under the different perspectives proved the irrationality of our evaluation under the sole aspect.For example,for Jilin Province,the CEPs of Sector 4?Mining and Processing of Nonmetal and Other Ores?ranked in the top 30%from the regional perspective.However,at the industrial level,the CEPs of Sector 4 ranked lower.The CEPs of the Sector 20?Production and Supply of Electric Power and Heat Power?of Heilongjiang Province ranked in the bottom 30%in a regional perspective but ranked first at the industrial level.We also found the advantage sectors in the CEP under the region–sector dual perspective.For example,for Jilin Province,Sector 10?Processing of Petroleum,Coking,and Processing of Nuclear Fuel?and Sector 16?Manufacture of Transport Equipment?were the advantageous sectors.The dual-perspective assessment aimed to evaluate the CEP under diverse views.It also provided a more reliable path to reduce CO₂ emissions for managers and regulators.In conclusion,the CEP evaluation results from the dual-perspective of the region-sector can provide a path for the overall regional carbon emission reduction,provide guidance reference for the relevant government policy makers,and help policy makers to formulate more appropriate emission reduction policies to meet the requirements of sustainable development.