| Since the Reform in 1978, China achieves great success in rapid economic growth, in the strengthening of China's comprehensive power and in the improvement of people's life. But for a long time, China's economic growth mode is high input, high consumption, high pollution and low efficiency. On one hand, China has become world manufacturing center, and her resources supply is under tense situation, especially for the rapid development of heavy and chemistry industry. On the other hand, the ever increasing environment pollutions and greenhouse air emission make a great economic loss, and China faces more pressure from the world for the environment pollution problems. China's resources and environment restrictions are much harsher in the future, just for the growing population, the rapid urbanization, the households' growing consumption level and the industry continues to grow. So it is more urgent than ever to change the unsustainable growth mode, and to turn to the sustainable development mode which harmonizes economic growth with population, resources and environment. On the macro level, Chinese government has established the country strategy of sustainable development, and has put forward scientific development theory and the concept of constructing harmonious society, to ensure a sound and rapid development. All these constructing the research background of the dissertation.As one of the development countries, China needs enough development space to ensure that the 1.3 billion people have adequate food and clothing and have employment of the 1.3 billion populations. So we must combine economic growth with environment protection in researching the topic of China's environment. The dissertation introduces resources and environment into provincial productivity research, and employs frontier analysis methods to investigate the energy input's influence on technical efficiency; The dissertation also employs directional distance function to compute province-level's all-factors productivity index, and decompose it into technical efficiency index and technical progress index; Then, the dissertation employs panel smooth transition model which is characteristic of endogenous grouping to investigate the influence factors of province-level's productivity. Based on the positive analysis, the dissertation makes conclusions as follows:(1) China's provincial energy efficiency is in a upward trend, and the energy input has a significant influence on provincial energy efficiency. As an important production factor, energy not only provides the driving force for economic and social development, on the other hand, but also brings forth ecology destruction and environmental pollution problem. The dissertation calculates the provincial total factor energy efficiency from 1995 to 2007, and applys four approaches, i.e., CSS, BC, KSS and DEA, to calculate provincial technical efficiency which contains the energy input variable. The result shows that China's provincial technical efficiency is generally in a downward trend within the sample period, but it has declined since 2006. Provincial technical efficiency is in a downward trend whether including energy input or not. The provincial technical efficiency rank changes after including energy input. The new rank is good for reflecting the quality of economic growth more accurately. The dissertation make a comparison among the results of different models, the KSS and DEA model shows good time-varying and robust characteristics.(2) China's environment performance of economic growth has improved persistently, and the TFP's contribution to the economic growth rate is quite low.The dissertation employ directional distance function and data envelope analysis to calculate total factor productivity index under three circumstance: First, calculates the provincial total factor productivity index without considering any pollutants; Second, calculates the provincial total factor productivity index incorporating COD, SO2 and solid pollutants respectively; Third, calculates the provincial total factor productivity index incorporating all the three environmental pollutants. And then the dissertation decomposes the TFP index into technical efficiency index and technical progress index. Under all the three above circumstances, China's provincial TFP rate is respectively -0.2%, 1.36%, 1.04%, 1.23%, and 2.30% during the sample period. The TFP index increased obviously after incorporating the environmental factors. This result is consistent with the fact that the intensity of pollutants' emission declined, which shows that China's environmental performance improved in recent years. The TFP's contribution to the economic growth rate of the corresponding period is respectively 14.50%, 11.09%, 13.10%, 24.52% when incorporates environmental factors, the main source of economic growth is the increase of factor input. The decomposition of TFP index indicates that technical progress is the primary driving force of the TFP rise, and provincial technical efficiency is in a downward trend. Most of the provinces which are on the productivity frontier lie in the eastern areas, few provinces lie in the middle or western areas.(3) There exists no country level absolute convergence of the provincial productivity whether incorporating environmental factors or not.On the basis of provincial TFP index and its decomposition, the dissertation furthermore investigates the provincial productivity's regional difference. It carries out absolute convergence test, club convergence test and conditional convergence test on the provincial productivity incorporating all the three environmental pollutants and incorporating no environmental pollutants respectively. It also applies kernel density estimation method to investigate the accumulative relative productivity and the dynamic evolvement of its distribution. The result shows that there exists no country level absolute convergence of the provincial productivity whether incorporating environmental factors or not. The provincial TFP index is in a divergence trend and the provincial technical efficiency index has a convergence trend when incorporates environmental factors. The distribution dynamic evolvement which is based on kernel density estimation further verifies the main conclusions of the coefficient convergence tests.(4) Provincial productivity has obvious heterogeneity, and the relationship between productivity and some variables has nonlinear characteristics.On the basis of TFP index estimation, the dissertation employs linear fixed effect model and nonlinear panel smooth transition model to investigate the influence of the 9 variables on provincial productivity including average per capita substance capital, etc. The PSTR models which regard industry configuration variables as transition variables indicate that China's provincial TFP has significant heterogeneity. In conclusion, the increase of foreign economic relations, the national income increase, infrastructure improvement and the increase of the large and medium enterprises' rate is beneficial for improving regional TFP, the improvement of organic composition of capital and the increase of heavy industry's rate will reduce regional TFP. The energy intensity under different industry scale structure and the secondary industry's rate under different light-heavy industrial structure have different effects on TFP.Based on the empirical study, the dissertation puts forward the following measures: (1) Improving energy efficiency, vigorously developing the clean energy and renewable energy. (2) Speeding up the adjustment of China' s industrial structure, promoting technical progress and autonomous innovation of enterprises. (3) Promoting cross-regional economic exchanges, narrowing the productivity gap between regions. (4) Carrying out and fulfilling the concept of scientific development, improving regional total factor productivity in the light of local conditions. |
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