With the continuous development of the global economy, global energy resources have been severely consumed in the past few decades. Under this situation, can trade play a positive role in optimizing the allocation of resources and help to solve the global energy problem? This topic is extremely important for promoting the sustainable development of global economy. However, up to now, little is known about the relationship between trade and energy consumption in production. This paper establishes a trade model at the firm-level to analyze the impacts of export on firms’ energy efficiency in production. Our model shows that export can lead to the increase of firms’ energy efficiency. We also propose a novel mechanism of innovation investment to explain why export affects firms’ environmental performance. Export can stimulate firms to invest more in innovation, and thereby improving firms’ energy efficiency, which implies that trade liberalization is beneficial to the improvement of firms’ environmental performance. These findings in our theoretical model can be applied to different industries and different countries. Altogether, this paper is the first theoretical analysis to study the impacts of export on firms’ energy efficiency, having important policy implications on promoting sustainable development of the global economy.

随着全球经济的不断发展，全球能源资源在过去几十年中被严重消耗。在这种情况下，贸易能否在优化资源配置、帮助解决全球能源问题方面发挥积极作用？这一课题对于促进全球经济的可持续发展极为重要。然而，迄今为止，人们对贸易与生产中能源消耗之间的关系知之甚少。本文建立了企业层面的贸易模型，分析出口对企业生产能效的影响。我们的模型表明，出口可以提高企业的能源效率。我们还提出了一种创新投资的新机制来解释为什么出口会影响企业的环境绩效。出口可以刺激企业更多地投资于创新，从而提高企业的能源效率，这意味着贸易自由化有利于企业环境绩效的改善。我们理论模型中的这些发现可以应用于不同的行业和不同的国家。总之，本文是第一个研究出口对企业能源效率影响的理论分析，对促进全球经济的可持续发展具有重要的政策意义。