Climate warming has become one of the most serious and challenging problems for human beings. It may not only force a group of people to leave their homes for generations, but also cause a global food crisis and cause intergenerational inequality in h...
Climate warming has become one of the most serious and challenging problems for human beings. It may not only force a group of people to leave their homes for generations, but also cause a global food crisis and cause intergenerational inequality in human development. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) believes that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, mainly CO2, are the main causes of global warming since the mid-20th century.
Anthropogenic CO2 emissions are closely related to the mode of economic development with high energy consumption and high consumption. International trade is an important part of economic development. For the sake of global sustainable development, it is necessary for countries(regions) in the world to promote the coordinated development between Controlling CO2 emissions and developing international trade.
China is a big developing country ‘the first in the world in two aspects’ with unbalanced provincial area development. In 2018, both CO2 emissions and international trade volume ranked first in the world. This brings a ‘dilemma’ to the sustainable development of the world: if CO2 emission is reduced according to the existing development model, the international trade volume will be reduced, but the global welfare of low-cost consumption ‘made in China’ of other countries will be damaged; if the CO2 emission is not reduced, the risk of climate warming will be increased and the global environmental quality will be damaged. Therefore, it is of great significance not only for China's sustainable development, but also for the world's sustainable development to explore the impact effect of China's provincial CO2 emissions on international trade. Based on this, the main research contents of this paper are as follows:
First, this paper constructs a framework of the effect of CO2 emissions on international trade. Based on the literature review of low carbon economy theory, new trade theory and regional coordinated development theory, this paper constructs a TSTX framework analysis to study the effect of CO2 emissions on international trade by using index decomposition method. That is to say, international trade (T) changes with the scale effect (S), technology effect (T) and trade dependence effect(X) of CO2 emissions. The global empirical results show that the scale effect changes in an inverted ‘U’ shape, the technological effect changes in a ‘V’ shape, and the export dependence effect change in a ‘J’ shape.
Second, TSTX is used to analyze the respective characteristics and comprehensive performance of the three impact effects of provincial areas in China. From the perspective of practice, since China's accession to the WTO, international trade has been developing rapidly as a whole. At the same time, the gap among provincial areas is also widening, and the phenomenon of spatial agglomeration appears. The impact effect was analyzed by using two dimensions of panel data and spatial data. The results of panel data show that China needs to further promote the process of globalization in order to better coordinate the relationship between CO2 emissions and international trade. The results of spatial data show that the neighboring provincial areas have a restrictive effect on the local international trade.
Finally, the effect is applied to China's low-carbon international trade policy. In the past, China took the road of high carbon international trade. In the future, China needs to develop low-carbon international trade, among which the key is to improve the comparative carbon productivity of international trade in provincial areas, so as to shoulder China's world responsibility.
The main contributions are 1) Building TSTX model which is a ‘bridge’ between low-carbon economics and international trade economics, 2) Building ECCP model which is the evaluation index of low-carbon international trade level. The main task of future research is to explore the mechanism of effects.