| Since it was proposed in 2013,the “Belt and Road” initiative(BRI)has become one of the most popular public goods in the world.By July 2022,China has signed more than 200 cooperation documents with more than 140 countries and 30 international organizations to jointly build the BRI.However,while the BRI has brought many development opportunities to participating countries,many commentators worry about the possible environmental hazards of this initiative.In order to respond to these concerns and actively respond to the sustainable development goals proposed by the United Nations,China has been vigorously promoting the construction of the green BRI in recent years.This paper first estimates the marginal abatement cost of carbon dioxide emission of 134 countries participating in the BRI and 39 countries not participating from 2009 to 2019 by using a combination of linear programming method and directional distance function,and uses foreign direct investment,trade openness,institutional quality,industrial structure and energy consumption structure to measure the economic environment and technology level of a country in order to divide countries into different groups,so as to take the economic proximity of countries into account in the calculation process of production frontier and the marginal abatement cost of carbon dioxide emission.Then this paper further explores the impact of the implementation of the BRI on the marginal abatement cost of carbon dioxide emission of participating countries,and conducts a series of heterogeneity analysis and robustness tests based on the result.The results of this paper show that:(1)The average inefficiency of the BRI countries is 2.22%,indicating that the average efficiency loss of the BRI countries is 2.22% every year.The calculation results of the marginal abatement costs of carbon dioxide emission show that the emission reduction costs of countries along the BRI are very different,and if the difference can be utilized,the emission reduction cost of participating countries will be reduced.(2)The implementation of the BRI has generally reduced the marginal abatement costs of participating countries,which proves that the BRI has a greater impact on the technological level of countries,but the utilization efficiency of advanced technology in countries is relatively low.The implementation of the BRI has also expanded the emission reduction space for participating countries.(3)The impact of the BRI on the marginal abatement cost of carbon dioxide emission is more obvious in low-income and upper-high-income countries,and also in countries along the route.Based on the above conclusions,this paper believes that China should continue to promote the construction of the green BRI,so that the achievements of the green BRI can benefit people in more countries and regions,and China should be committed to building the BRI as a platform to provide countries with the possibility of emission reduction cooperation.Finally,China should pay attention to the utilization of advanced technologies while making efforts to bring them into other countries,so that these technologies can play the largest role in all countries.The main contributions of this paper are as follows:(1)When calculating the marginal abatement costs of carbon dioxide emission of each country,this paper does not use manual grouping,but automatically groups by software by introducing variables.This approach avoids the errors that may be caused by manual grouping,and measures the economic and technological level gap between countries in a more accurate way,so as to more accurately estimate the marginal abatement costs of each country,It forms a beneficial supplement to the existing research on marginal abatement costs.(2)The research on the marginal abatement cost in this paper takes a different perspective from previous research.The proposed method for measuring the marginal abatement cost of carbon dioxide is applied at the national level,which complements the gap in the application of methods for measuring the marginal abatement cost.(3)Existing literature mostly analyzes the impact of the Belt and Road Initiative using only data from countries along the Belt and Road,with less attention to non-BRI countries.This paper is a good complement to the existing research,and also has some reference value for the future construction of green BRI. |
