Influence Mechanism And Empirical Research Of FDI On Carbon Emissions In China

Under the background of global economic integration,China has attracted a large amount of foreign direct investment(FDI)with preferential investment policy and good investment environment,and has become one of the major FDI investment countries in the world.However,when FDI promotes the rapid development of economy in china,it also inevitably increases the level of carbon emissions,causing negative impacts on the environment.At this stage,china has far surpassed the United States and become the largest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world.Therefore,we should handle the relationship between FDI and carbon emissions properly,make FDI give full play to the positive effects on carbon emissions and minimize its negative effects,which is of great significance for the development of low-carbon economy in china.Firstly,this paper elaborates the influence mechanism of FDI on carbon emissions from the perspectives of scale effect,structure effect,technology effect and regulation effect.On the basis of clarifying the influence mechanism,we have a general understanding of the total change and distribution characteristics of FDI from 1997 to 2016 in china,and we calculate and analyze the characteristics of the total carbon emissions and carbon emission intensity of 30 provinces(except Tibet)from 1997 to 2016.And we find that the decoupling state between FDI and total carbon emissions is not ideal by constructing decoupling model.To further clarify the impact of FDI on carbon emissions in China,we take total carbon emissions as explained variables,FDI as core explanatory variable,adding the five control variables of economic growth,industrial structure,technical level,environmental regulation and trade dependence,and establish a dynamic panel model of 30 provinces which is estimated by system GMM.Estimation results show that the total carbon emissions with a lag period,FDI,economic growth,industrial structure and trade dependence all increase the level of total carbon emission,while technological progress and environmental regulation are beneficial to reduce the level of carbon emissions in China,but the latter is not significant.Lastly,we compare the impact of FDI on total carbon emissions by establishing static panel models of the three regions of East,Central and West,indicating that there are certain regional differences in the influence of FDI on the total carbon emissions:The growth of FDI in the eastern region can restrain the increase of total carbon emissions to a certain extent,while the total carbon emissions all increase significantly with the inflow of FDI in the central and western regions.In order to explore the relationship between FDI and carbon emission efficiency ulteriorly,this paper measures the carbon emission efficiency of each province based on DEA-GML index method from 1997-2016.Through the analysis of carbon emission efficiency,we find that the average carbon emission efficiency of 30 provinces is decreasing,and the regional carbon emission efficiency decreases gradually in the order of eastern,central and western region.Then,in order to analyze the influence of FDI on carbon emission efficiency,we establish the tobit panel model from the perspective of the whole country and the three regions of East,Central and West.The results of the study indicate that the inflow of FDI generally reduces the carbon emission efficiency of the whole country,eastern region and central region,but the impact on the carbon emission efficiency of the western regions is not significant.Finally,according to the research results,we put forward the following policy recommendations:(1)Continue to expand the scale of foreign direct investment and improve the quality of FDI;(2)Speed up the upgrading of industrial structure and optimize the industry investment structure of FDI;(3)Improve the ability of independent innovation and give full play to technology spillover effect of FDI;(4)Optimize the environmental regulation system and raise the access standards of FDI;(5)Adjust the trade structure and promote the development of low-carbon trade.