Abstract
As the country with the largest carbon emissions globally, the effective operation of China’s carbon emissions trading scheme (ETS) is of great importance to the global community in terms of mitigating climate change. This paper considers China’s pilot ETS launched in 2013 as a quasi-natural experiment. Exploring provincial industrial-level data that are more in line with the ETS coverage, the difference-in-difference-in-difference (DDD) model is used to evaluate the impact of the ETS on carbon productivity. Considering different pilot regions and industries, we also analyze the heterogeneous effect of ETS. Moreover, the mediating effects of technical progress and capital investment are explored. We find that China’s pilot ETS boosted carbon productivity. Among pilot regions, the best policy effectiveness appeared in Beijing, while the weakest effectiveness appeared in Chongqing. Among the pilot industries, the pilot ETS had better effectiveness in petrochemical and electric power industries and weaker effectiveness in building materials and transportation industries. Additionally, the pilot ETS promoted carbon productivity through both technological progress and capital investment, and the former contributed more. Our findings can provide empirical references and policy implications for nationwide implementation of ETS to further promote low-carbon economic transformation.
Highlights
The issue of global warming has aroused widespread concern around the world [1]
The interaction term coefficient is significantly positive, and the carbon productivity of the treatment group increased by 58.25% after the pilot emissions trading scheme (ETS) implementation, compared to the control group
Higher carbon price is an effective incentive for enterprises to adopt emission reduction measures that are conducive to carbon productivity increase [32]
Summary
The issue of global warming has aroused widespread concern around the world [1]. Changes in the global climate have significant impacts on the environment, economic activities, and residents’health [2,3,4]. Excessive emissions of greenhouse gases caused by energy consumption, such as carbon dioxide (CO2 ), are believed to be the main cause of such a warming [5,6,7]. China faces a major challenge of achieving energy conservation and emission reduction without sacrificing economic development as a developing economy with a population of 1.4 billion [9,10,11]. To tackle this challenge, increasing carbon productivity has been identified as an effective way [12]
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