Abstract
As the world’s largest developing country, and as the home to many of the world’s factories, China plays a crucial role in the sustainable development of the world economy regarding environmental protection, energy conservation, and emission reduction issues. Based on the data from 2003–2015, this paper examined the green total factor productivity and the technological progress in the Chinese manufacturing industry. A slack-based measure (SBM) Malmquist productivity index was used to measure the bias of technological change (BTC), input-biased technological change (IBTC), and output-biased technological change (OBTC) by decomposing the technological progress. It also investigated the mechanism of environmental regulation, property right structure, enterprise-scale, energy consumption structure, and other factors on China’s technological progress bias. The empirical results showed the following: (1) there was a bias of technological progress in the Chinese manufacturing industry during the research period; (2) although China’s manufacturing industry’s output tended to become greener, it was still characterized by a preference for overall CO2 output; and (3) the impact of environmental regulations on the Chinese manufacturing industry’s technological progress had a significant threshold effect. The flexible control of environmental regulatory strength will benefit the Chinese manufacturing industry’s technological development. (4) R&D investment, export delivery value, and structure of energy consumption significantly contributed to promoting technological progress. This study provides further insight into the sustainable development of China’s manufacturing sector to promote green-biased technological progress and to achieve the dual goal of environmental protection and healthy economic growth.
Highlights
As a pillar industry of the economy, the manufacturing industry has laid a good foundation for China’s vigorous economic development and has earned a reputation as the world’s factory
Meng et al [43] analyzed the role of environmental regulation and green innovation in the intelligent development of China’s manufacturing industry, and the results showed that environmental regulation and green innovation have a positive effect on the intelligent upgrading of manufacturing
In order to better understand the sources of green total factor productivity (TFP) growth and technology change in the Chinese manufacturing sector from 2003 to 2015, Table 3 presents the average of green TFP and its decomposition over the observation period for 27 industries in the Chinese manufacturing sector
Summary
As a pillar industry of the economy, the manufacturing industry has laid a good foundation for China’s vigorous economic development and has earned a reputation as the world’s factory. In the past 20 years, China’s economy has grown rapidly. In 2019, the manufacturing industry’s added value reached 26.9 trillion yuan 2021)), but behind the rapid growth are high energy consumption, high emissions, and high investment. In 2007, China replaced the United States as the world’s largest CO2 emitting country. The manufacturing industry’s energy consumption and carbon emissions account for one-third of China’s total energy consumption and carbon emissions and two-thirds of the entire industrial sector. In recent years, developed countries have been transferring low-end manufacturing and labor-intensive manufacturing to developing countries such as China through foreign investment.
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