Abstract
This study empirically investigates the impact of industrial structure upgrading on global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by employing a balanced dataset of 73 countries over the period 1990–2019. After conducting a series of empirical tests, we used the fixed effect (FE) and random effect (RE) methods to estimate the econometric model, and divided the full sample data into two subsamples, i.e., Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) countries and non-RCEP countries, for heterogeneous analysis. This study also examines the mediating role of technological innovation in the relationship between industrial structure upgrading and global CO2 emissions. The main findings indicate that: (1) both industrial structure upgrading and technological innovation show significant negative impacts on CO2 emissions in the global panel, the RCEP countries, and the non-RCEP countries; (2) industrial structure upgrading not only affects CO2 emissions directly, but also has an indirect impact on global CO2 emissions by promoting technological innovation; and (3) the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis is verified in this study; in other words, both economic growth and CO2 emissions exhibit a significant inverted U-shaped relationship in the global panel, the RCEP countries, and the non-RCEP countries. Finally, we highlighted some important policy implications with respect to promoting industrial structure upgrading and mitigating the greenhouse effect.
Highlights
The past few decades have witnessed unparalleled economic growth due to rapid industrialization across the globe
Estimates for the Global Panel Based on the empirical analysis earlier, this study investigates the nexus between industrial structure upgrading and CO2 emissions by estimating Eq (2) for the global panel
The first and second columns of the table report the estimation results for the empirical model without technological innovation based on the fixed effect (FE) and random effect (RE) methods, respectively; the third and fourth columns of the table present the results of the FE and RE estimates for the model with technological innovation, respectively
Summary
The past few decades have witnessed unparalleled economic growth due to rapid industrialization across the globe. According to the statistics from the former British Petroleum company (BP, 2020), along with this boom in economics, the primary energy consumption has increased nearly twofold worldwide, from 7,820.7 million tons of oil equivalent (Mtoe) in 1990 to 13,301.4 Mtoe in 2019 This rapid increase in energy consumption has triggered tremendous challenges related to the global environmental pressures (Cheng et al, 2019; Dong et al, 2020a; Zhao et al, 2021a), the greenhouse effect. From the perspective of changes in the national industrial structure, industrial structure upgrading means that the national economic barycenter moves from primary industry to secondary industry, and to tertiary industry Since this process is usually accompanied by the development of high-tech industries, many scholars believed that it can mitigate environmental pressure caused by CO2 emissions (Cheng et al, 2018; Peng et al, 2018; Zhou et al, 2018). To the best of our knowledge, the existing literature on the impact of industrial structure upgrading on CO2 emissions is based mainly on Chinese cases, and very few studies on this issue are obtained from the global perspective
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