| The grim situation of global warming poses a serious threat to human’s survival anddevelopment. How to deal with the global climate change and develop low-carboneconomy has become a hot topic which gets wide attentions of international society and allcountries. On December21,1990, the45th UN general assembly launched the UNframework convention on climate change. Until now, the international climate changenegotiation has been through more than20years. All though the process is tough, it getssome results. The developed countries have to finish mandatory and quantitative targets ofreducing greenhouse gas emissions. So in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,transfer the costs of emissions reduction and protect domestic products, the developedcountries set up low-carbon trade barriers on high-carbon imports from developingcountries. Low-carbon trade barriers conform to the trend of the development oflow-carbon economy and thus will become the main barriers with which the developingcountries will encounter in international trade.As the world’s largest trading nation and CO2emitter, China will become the maintarget of low-carbon trade barriers. Such barriers will increase the costs of high-carbonproducts and reduce China’s exports. More seriously, it will make lots of substandardproducts be rejected, thus having a big adverse impact on our export trade. Therefore, it hasimportant theoretical and practical significance to deeply analyze low-carbon trade barriersand their potential impacts on China’s export trade, and design effective policies andmeasures for Chinese government and enterprises to cope with them.The paper firstly introduces the research background and significance, the literaturereview, the methods, content, framework, the innovations and deficiencies.Then, the paper analyzes environmental priority new trade protection theory,externality theory, public goods theory and free riding theory with theoretical study method.On the basis of these theories, the paper elaborates the concept, background, form,implementation, characteristics and development trend of low-carbon trade barriers with theoretical research and qualitative analysis methods, thus forming a theoretical system oflow-carbon trade barriers.Next, the paper analyzes the current situation of China’s export trade from four aspectswith qualitative and quantitative analysis method. Through comparative analysis of China’senergy consumption structure and the level of CO2emissions with other countries, it isconcluded that the coal-dominated energy consumption structure is the key reason whyChina becomes the world’s largest CO2emitter. Based on the input and output data and theenergy consumption data of2002,2005,2007and2010, the paper constructs input-outputmodel to measure China’s export embodied carbon and analyze what belongs tohigh-carbon export industry. The result shows that the export embodied carbon emissionsare increasing with the growth of the export trade volume, accounting for20%-30%ofChina’s total CO2emissions, and the high-carbon export industry includes machinerymanufacturing, metal products manufacturing, chemical industry and textile, garment andleather products manufacturing.In the following section, the paper studies the positive and negative impacts oflow-carbon trade barriers on China’s export trade with qualitative and quantitative analysismethod. Such tarriers will increase the costs of high-carbon exports, thus damaging thetrade interests. The analysis shows that the carbon tariff rate of$30/tonne will cause a lossof4%-8%of China’s annual export interests. Moreover, they will also reduce China’sexports and result in high-carbon industry offshore development and high-carbon exportsbackflow. But from another aspect, they can promote the export commodity structureoptimization and the transformation of the mode of trade, motivate the export enterprises’independent innovation and provide an opportunity for the development of carbon tradingmarket in China. Also, the paper does an empirical analysis of the impact of carbon tariff onChina’s export trade by introducing a new explanatory variables "the strength of carbontariff imposed on China’s exports by USA " and constructing a gravity model. The resultshows that the carbon tariff will reduce China’s exports.Finally, the paper designs the countermeasures to cope with low-carbon trade barriersfrom international and domestic aspects. Chinese government and enterprises should notonly carry out a series of political and economic activities on the international stage, but also should take corresponding measures to avoid or reduce the impacts of low-carbon tradebarriers from themselves. |
