The Research On The Driving Factors And Convergence Of Regional Carbon Productivity In China

Currently, climate issues is a huge challenge for mankind and global warming has affected the survival and development of human beings. Developing low-carbon economy and changing the mode of growth have become the inevitable choice of countries around the world to tackle climate change. The purpose of this paper is analyzing the driver factors and the convergence of regional carbon productivity by quantitative and qualitative methods, helping correct understanding of carbon productivity effect on China’s economic development and improvement of the environment, to maintain the sustainable economic growth in our country, reducing carbon emissions and increase carbon productivity, to narrow the gap in regional carbon productivity, providing powerful basis for the utilization of regional economic, environmental and social benefit.This paper first calculates the carbon productivity of 29 provinces, three major regions and the nation from 1995 to 2011 in China. From the perspective of the province, during 1995-2012, most of China’s carbon productivity keep rising, but the carbon productivity of different provinces have obvious difference. From the perspective of region, provinces and cities of high carbon productivity mostly concentrated in the eastern coastal developed areas, the low carbon productivity of provinces and cities are located in the Midwest. Through making an empirical analysis on the driving factors of China’s carbon productivity by constructing the panel data model. The results show that there is large gap of carbon productivity in different areas in China. The east has the highest level of carbon productivity, which is obviously higher than that of the middle and the west. The carbon productivity of the west is higher than that of the middle before 2006, and it is overtaken by the middle after 2006. In addition, technological advance have an obvious positive effect, while opening degree, energy consumption structure and industrial structure have distinct negative effect on the increase of China’s carbon productivity. The industrial structure and energy consumption structure have bigger negative effects on improving the carbon productivity.This paper further use Theil index method to measure the overall carbon productivity in 29 provinces and cities in China, between the three regional and area as well as the area between provinces, index, and calculate the contribution rate of each, the overall index. The result shows that there is a big regional differences of carbon productivity in our country, regional Theil index is much greater than the area between the index and area index consistent with the overall basic change trend, while regional Theil index showed a trend of decline, show that the carbon productivity regional differences mainly caused by regional differences, the Middle East, and west internal differences had the greatest influence on overall difference. The influence of the regional differences on total difference became smaller. In addition, this paper using stochastic convergence method and take stochastic convergence test on carbon productivity of the country and major regions. The results show that there is no random convergence of carbon productivity between 29 provinces and cities.Based on the above findings, this article put forward to improve China’s carbon productivity, reduce carbon productivity gap between regions and relatively stable equilibrium of policy recommendations. Including regional low-carbon economic cooperation and development; Optimize the industrial structure, improve energy efficiency; The development and utilization of new energy and renewable energy, and promote low-carbon technology research and development and applications. To develop low carbon policy, establish environmental monitoring and control system, to promote the sustainable development of economy of our country.