A Political Economics Analysis on China's Regional Low-carbon Competitiveness: Theory and Empirical Test

Abstract

How to correctly recognize the influencing factors of regional low-carbon competitiveness and the role of local governments in the process of regional low-carbon economic development is of great significance to sustainable development of regional economy. This paper constructs a regional low-carbon competitiveness (RCC) model under the framework of Marx's value theory to explore the mechanism of the reasons for the differences in regional low-carbon competitiveness in China. And it makes an empirical research by using panel data of China's 30 provinces from 2000 to 2012, and focuses on the performance differences in the effects of two types of government environmental governance on regional low-carbon competitiveness. It comes to the conclusions as follows:firstly, regional low-carbon competitiveness can decompose into traditional factor endowment effect, government governance effect, technical change effect and interior industrial structure; government governance and technical change have positive effects on regional low-carbon competitiveness and interior industrial structure has the negative effect on regional low-carbon competitiveness while the effect of traditional factor endowment on regional low-carbon competitiveness is uncertain and is determined by dynamic interaction among capital input scale, human capital and organic capital composition; secondly, due to the time-lag and accumulative characteristics of government support policy for investment in pollution control, the performance of government environmental governance mode based on administrative regulation is slightly better than the one of environmental governance mode based on government support for investment in pollution control in terms of the control of production emissions pollution and the improvement of regional low-carbon competitiveness; thirdly, the total performance in terms of the effect of government environment governance on regional low-carbon competitiveness is weaker than the one in terms of effects of traditional factors and interior industrial structure. Therefore, the two-pronged governance mode, namely the increase in investment in pollution control and the enhancement of environment regulation, should be the critical choice of improving environment governance performance and guiding green development by local governments.