The Evaluation And Improvement Pathways Of Green And Low-carbon Development In China’s Industrial Sector

China’s industrial development has the typical characteristics of "high energy consumption and high emissions".However,such extensive growth has brought about serious resource and environmental problems,and has failed to meet the development requirements of the new era.In this context,clarifying the path of industrial carbon emission reduction,improving industrial green production efficiency(GPE),and transforming the industrial development mode has become important to overcome the dual dilemma of resource and environment,and achieve green industrial development.In view of it,this paper tries to answer the following three aspects questions:what are the influencing factors of China’s industrial carbon emissions?What is the decoupling relationship and its determinants between industrial carbon emissions and industrial economic growth?What are the evolution and change sources of industrial GPE in the past two decades?What are the influencing factors of industrial GPE?How to improve the industrial GPE and promote industrial green and low-carbon development in the future?To answer these questions,this paper investigated the factors of industrial carbon emissions by an extended STIRPAT model.Secondly,the decoupling relationship was evaluated,and the driving factors of decoupling process were explored mainly from the perspectives of technology and efficiency.Furthermore,based on the"environmental technology" and meta-frontier theory framework,the model of evaluating industrial GPE was constructed.Then,the industrial green production inefficiency level,sources and improvement potential were discussed.Finally,a spatial econometric model was constructed to analyze the influencing factors of China’s industrial GPE.The main conclusions are draw as follows:(1)from 2000 to 2019,China’s industrial carbon emissions showed an obvious growth trend,the trajectory of the center of gravity moved from southeast to northwest.There was an inverted U-shaped relationship between industrial carbon emissions and affluence,which verifies the environmental Kuznets curve.There was a significant positive correlation between industrial carbon emissions and investment scale,energy structure and government policy support,and a significant negative correlation between industrial carbon emissions and R&D intensity and marketization.(2)During the study period,weak decoupling was the dominant relationship.Investment scale expansion was the largest factor hindering decoupling process.Both energy saving and production technology achieved significant progress,which facilitated the decoupling process.Meanwhile,the energy technology gap and production technology gap among regions have been narrowed,and played a role in promoting decoupling process.On the contrary,both economy scale efficiency and pure technical efficiency have inhibiting effects on decoupling process.The former indicates that the economy scale of China’s industry was not conducive to improve energy efficiency and production efficiency,while the latter indicates that there may exist resource misallocation problem in both energy market and product market.(3)Industrial GPE has achieved significant improvement.Technology progress was the most critical driving force.The narrowed technology gap and the improved management efficiency also played positive roles.The decline of scale efficiency hindered the industrial GPE improvement.Technology progress and management efficiency improvement were two main sources of industrial GPE improvement in eastern China,while the improvement of industrial GPE in central and western China mainly benefits from technology progress and narrowed technology gap.(4)Currently,China’s overall industrial GPE is at a relatively low level.Technology gap inefficiency was the most important source of GPE inefficiency.Technology gap inefficiencies mainly exist in western China,economic scale inefficiency mainly exist in central and western China,management inefficiency mainly exist in western and eastern China.Besides,China’s industrial green production has a huge emission reduction potential.Technology gap was the largest source of emission reduction potential,followed by management efficiency improvement potential and scale efficiency optimization potential.(5)Under the geographical distance spatial weight matrix and geographical adjacency spatial weight matrix,the industrial GPE at provincial level shows a "high-high" and "low-low"clustering characteristics.The spatial spillover effect of industrial GPE in different provinces was significant.There exist a significant negative correlation between environmental regulation,foreign direct investment,industrial energy structure,industrial capital deepening and industrial GPE,while significantly positively correlated with economic openness and industrial R&D intensity.Finally,this paper put forward relevant policy implementations for promoting the green and low-carbon industrial development of China from the aspects of promoting market-oriented reform and regional balanced development,optimizing industrial scale and spatial layout,strengthening industrial technology innovation,and actively introducing high-quality foreign investment.