Low-carbon Transition And Relative Poverty:alleviating Or Exacerbating?

In the journey to the second centenary goal,the 20 th Party Congress set the overall goal for 2035,which includes "achieving more substantial progress in the common prosperity of all people" and "extensively forming green production and lifestyle".After the eradication of absolute poverty,the governance of relative poverty has become a new intrinsic requirement for achieving common prosperity,so the alleviation of relative poverty and low-carbon transformation is the key to achieving China’s second centenary goal,and it is also the focus of attention from all walks of life.Low-carbon transformation is a profound social change,which will inevitably have an impact on the production,investment,consumption and other fields of society,resulting in the transformation of new and old production and distribution methods and even the redistribution of social wealth.In the process of building common prosperity in our country,solving the problem of relative poverty through reasonable and equitable distribution is a crucial link.After eliminating absolute poverty,the Fourth Plenary Session of the 19 th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China proposed to establish a long-term mechanism to solve relative poverty,which clarified the focus of China’s future poverty alleviation work(Wang Chen et al.,2020).However,the current lack of clarity on the relationship between the low-carbon transition and relative poverty mitigation may lead to policy inconsistencies between sectors.In addition,most of the existing research on the social effects of low-carbon transition is based on the environmental Kuznets curve,focusing on the long-term trend analysis of the low-carbon transition effect.Long-term analysis helps to predict the impact of the future low-carbon transition,but it cannot accurately estimate the impact of the current low-carbon transition,and how to deal with the current possible problems is the key to our transition to the other side of the "U-shaped curve" with a more optimized path.Policy formulation also urgently needs to understand the current stage of China’s low-carbon transition,which has important theoretical and practical significance for avoiding possible risks in the process of low-carbon transformation,strengthening the systematic and scientific nature of policy design,and realizing green and low-carbon transformation and common prosperity.Therefore,based on the data of the China Household Tracking Survey(CFPS)from 2010 to 2018,this paper first analyzes the impact of low-carbon transition on relative poverty,and takes the low-carbon city pilot policy as a "quasi-natural experiment" to test the current stage of low-carbon transition in China,and further analyzes the impact mechanism of the current low-carbon transition on relative poverty.The results show that: 1.The impact of low-carbon transition on the relative poverty of residents shows an inverted U-shaped characteristic.In the short term,the technology level and demand structure are relatively stable,and the low-carbon transition is not conducive to the alleviation of relative poverty of residents.In the long term,after the technological level and economic structure are adapted,a mature low-carbon economy will help alleviate relative poverty.2.At present,China is still on the left side of the inverted U-shape,that is,the lowcarbon transition will have a greater impact on relative poverty,and this conclusion still holds after a series of robustness tests.Through further mechanism analysis,it is found that the current low-carbon transition impacts relative poverty through innovation effect and cost effect,and Porter’s hypothesis and cost compliance may have different impacts on economic development,but in the short term,both effects deepen relative poverty to varying degrees.3.At the individual level,the low-carbon city pilot policy has exacerbated the relative poverty probability of urban residents,and the impact on the relative poverty of low-skilled workers is more obvious.At the regional level,the effect of low-carbon city pilot policies on relative poverty of residents significantly exacerbated relative poverty in high-carbon emission cities and central regions,but did not have obvious effects in low-carbon emission areas and eastern regions.