The Evaluation Of Environmental And Economic Effects Of China’s Carbon Trading

In theory,the carbon emissions trading mechanism is an effective way to achieve carbon dioxide emissions reduction,reasonable and strict environmental regulation measures will fulfill the economic benefits.The successful experience of foreign countries shows that carbon trading mechanism can effectively reduce the carbon dioxide emissions as well as fulfill the economic benefits.But in the existing literatures,there are few empirical researches about the environmental and economic effect of China’s carbon emissions trading pilot,which is obviously lacking in the researches on the upcoming national carbon emissions trading policy.On the one hand,considering the policy target of carbon trading is to achieve emissions reduction of carbon dioxide,this paper evaluates the environmental effects of carbon trading policy by evaluating the carbon dioxide reduction.On the other hand,as a test of the Porter hypothesis,this paper assesses the economic effects of carbon trading by assessing the impact of carbon trading policy on total factor productivity of listed companies.Specifically,based on the quasi natural experiment on carbon trading conducted in China from October 2011,this paper analyzes the environmental and economic dividends of China’s carbon emissions trading policy by using the difference-in-difference model.We find that the carbon trading in China has a significant policy effect on the carbon dioxide emissions reduction in six regions after eliminating the regional and time fixed effects and controlling various factors that may affect the outcome variables,which means the carbon trading policy fulfills the environmental dividend.We also find that the carbon trading in China has a significant policy effect on the total factor productivity of the listed companies of relevant industries in pilot areas after eliminating the enterprise and time fixed effects and controlling various factors that may affect the outcome variables,which means the carbon trading policy fulfills the economic dividend.In addition,this paper uses the mediating effect analysis method,and it turns out that China’s carbon emission trading policy takes into effect by two effective ways including reducing energy consumption and adjusting the energy consumption structure.At the same time,through heterogeneity analysis,it is found that the increase of productivity brought by carbon trading is only established for non-state-owned enterprises.The Porter Hypothesis is validated only in the sample of non-state-owned enterprises.