How does foreign trade influence China’s carbon productivity? Based on panel spatial lag model analysis

Abstract

Foreign trade is one of the main sources of China’s carbon emissions. Carbon productivity has become an important approach to measure the level of low carbon development, because it can integrate the goals of economic development and carbon reduction. Therefore, it is of great significance to understand the influencing mechanisms of foreign trade on China's carbon productivity to improve trade quality and low carbon development. This research measured China’s carbon productivity and analyzed the effect of foreign trade on carbon productivity through applying spatial lag model with the data of 30 provinces from 2000 to 2014. The results show that China's carbon productivity had obviously positive spatial spillover effect. Export-import significantly improved China's carbon productivity and mainly through import. As for the regional regression results, foreign trade of the western region contributed the most to enhance China’s carbon productivity, while the eastern and central regions were at the stage that the foreign trade inhibited carbon productivity. Policy recommendations were put forward in terms of the emphasis of import trade, the optimization of trade structure, the customized measures in different regions to improve carbon productivity. Furthermore, provinces should coordinate with each other and eliminate inter-regional barriers to promote the market-oriented distribution of production factors, in order to realize the spillover effect of carbon productivity.