The Research On China’s Value-added Emission In Export Trade In The Context Of Global Value Chain

Since 1990 s,China has integrated into international economic system as “world factory” rapidly through export trade and hence played an increasingly important role in global value chains(GVCs).However,the surge in exports trade brought about frequent trade sanctions such as anti-dumping or countervailing measures as well.Hence,China has faced growing international pressure.China has also become the world’s largest contributor to net outflow of resources,which resulted in the issues of energy consumption,environmental degradation and weakening ecological capacity.It is of great importance for China’s export sectors to reverse the extensive growth pattern characterized as “high resources consumption,pollutant and emission intensive” in order to make the dual transformation of low carbon and upgrade in GVCs positions.Therefore,it is necessary to assess the cost and benefit of China’s linking into GVCs through export comprehensively in order to minimize the embodied carbon emissions per unit domestic value-added in export trade.This dissertation focuses on the cost and benefit assessment,causal analysis and intervention of China’s linking into GVCs through export.The details are as follows:The first chapter mainly expounds the research background and significance of study of Value-Added Emission in Export Trade(VAEE),and then describes the research subject,research methodology,the basic ideas and technology roadmap,and innovation of the dissertation.It is indicated in this chapter that the VAEE can inform the policy makers when governing the GVCs and setting the abatement goals for export sectors as well as provide a methodological framework for the assessment of the environmental efficiency of linking into GVCs in other disciplinaries.The second chapter gives a literature review of the progresses and trends of the relevant fields,namely,embodied carbon,Trade in Value-Added(Ti VA),carbon efficiency and mitigation potential in the context of GVCs.This chapter shows that the studies of embodied carbon and TiVA assess environmental cost or benefit alone whereas the study of carbon efficiency and mitigation potential evaluate the overall efficiency of an industry or a region as a whole rather than the efficiency of export trade sectors in particular.Therefore,it is needed to combine the methodology of the abovementioned areas together to assess the cost and benefit,causes and environmental efficiency and mitigation potential of China export trade through the study of VAEE.The third chapter puts forward a new concept of VAEE with reference of embodied carbon emission and discusses the necessity of evolve it from traditional embodied carbon and TiVA.Then the estimation methodology of VAEE under input and output framework is discussed on the basis of constructing of the continuous constant price IO tables with RAS approach at both national and provincial levels.The fourth chapter estimates the VAEE of either national,industrial or provincial level and analyses the features of national,industrial and regional VAEE of China.It is reported in this chapter China’s VAEE is much higher than the carbon emission of per GDP,which suggests the environmental cost of per unit domestic value added in export trade is much higher than domestic created GDP.The VAEE in labor intensive industries decreases most rapidly among all other industry groups.The VAEE of energy intensive industries such as “Petroleum Processing and Coking”,“Chemistry”,“Metallurgy” and “Transportation” holds up so high that it has slowed the decline of VAEE as a whole.Therefore,the sectoral gap of the industries has widened.From the regional perspective,both the China’s VAEE and its percentage of decline goes up from the east to the west.Carbon intensive and low value export industries tended to agglomerate in some energy and resource-based provinces in the middle and west parts of China.The fifth chapter estimates China’s VAEE and its causes of changes and compares it with developed and emerging economies under the YNU-GMRIO-SDA framework.This chapter indicates that though China has seen fastest decline in VAEE during past decades,it still remains the highest among the major country(economy)groups throughout world.The decrease in energy intensity contribute most to the decline of China’s VAEE,though the technical progress and structural change in export mix reduces China’s VAEE more or less.The value-added rate and the marginal effect of production technology on value added rate has small but limited impact on EVAE as the result of China’s linking into some emission intensive and low value-added section of GVCs.The marginal value added effect of change in export mix on VAEE is negative and tended to be widened,which suggests the structural transformation of export trade sectors and adjustment of industrial structure achieves initial success.The sixth chapter employs dynamic panel data analysis on China’s VAEE at a 43-industrial level to investigate the relationship between the participation of international vertical specialization(VSS)and VAEE.China’s VSS raises VAEE as a whole but varies between different industries,which suggests China’s 43 industries as a whole tend to be low-end and high-carbon locked in GVCs.Linking into energy-intensive,capital-intensive,high value-added industries helps to reduce VAEE.In contrast,participation of labor intensive,high-end service will have negative impact on VAEE mitigation which infers that all these industries in China are linked into low-value added but emission-intensive segment in GVCs which will go against to China’s mitigation effort in VAEE.The seventh chapter assesses the efficiency and mitigation potential of valueadded emissions in export at provincial level based on slack-based measurement model.It is shown that the efficiency of China’s value-added emissions in export trade mounts rapidly but presents significant regional heterogeneity.The efficiency of China’s valueadded emissions in export trade descends quickly from the east to the west while the western China grows at the fastest speed in efficiency.Even under the provincial technical feasible set,China’s export embodied carbon still has great mitigation potential.The big export province(Guangdong,Zhejiang)and energy-based provinces(Shandong,Hebei)is the key area of embodied carbon mitigation.The provinces of Northeast,Middle China and West China such as Liaoning,Shanxi,Xinjiang,Sichuan,Inner Mongolia,Yunnan also has great mitigation potential.The eighth chapter concludes the dissertation and puts forward the relevant policy suggestion while it discusses research limitations and its future research prospect.This chapter suggests that it is necessary to set VAEE as monitoring index when constructing the low carbon value chains to strengthen the mitigation effect of export sectors.It is advisable for China to develop low carbon technology of energy intensive sectors,such as “Petroleum Processing and Coking”,“Chemistry”,“Metallurgy” and “Transportation”,to adjust trade mix,to develop clean production technology and carbon trading market in order to abate export embodied carbon.Moreover,it is imperative to impose tighter eco-environmental restriction on the provinces with large mitigation power,such as Guangdong,Zhejiang,Shandong,Hebei,Liaoning,Shanxi,Xinjiang,Sichuan,Inner Mongolia and Yunnan.In addition,when carrying out the regional development strategies such as integrated development of Beijing,Tianjin and Hebei,the revitalization of the former industrial base in Northeast China,the rise of the Central Plains,the development of the West,great attention should be attached to avoid the regional transfer of carbon intensive industries from east to middle and west part of China and prevent the cross-regional carbon leakage.The methodology of constructing continuous constant price IO tables at both national and provincial level with GDP accounting data,import and export trade data,price indices will help modern econometric tools to be applied in the static and comparative static IO research paradigms.The VAEE approach to assess the environmental cost and benefit will overcome the shortcomings of traditional economical statistic methods which constrains within the national territory and provides references for the evaluation of ecological capacity in other disciplinaries in the context of global value chains.