Abstract
Low-carbon pilot (LCP) policy aims to not only achieve economic development but also address climate change problems in China. With a difference-in-difference (DID) approach, this study provides empirical evidence to support the policy’s implementation by analysing its impacts on green total factor productivity (GTFP). We find that the implementation of the low-carbon pilot policy has a significant positive impact on GTFP. The low-carbon pilot policy significantly improves the GTFP in the year following implementation, and its efficacy diminishes over time. In terms of mechanism analysis, the policy enables China to achieve win-win development through industry structure adjustment and foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows. Innovation does not immediately improve GTFP, although the low-carbon pilot policy promotes regional innovation. Our results provide strong support for China’s recent third set of low-carbon pilot policies. As for global mitigation strategy, countries should incorporate the low-carbon development path into their strategic planning. In particular, developing countries should enforce more efforts on low-carbon development as such development path may improve their green productivity. It helps narrow the gap between developing and developed countries.
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Funding
This study received financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 71771082, 71371067, 71420107027 and 71673083) and Hunan Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 2017JJ1012).
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Appendix
Appendix
We select six variables, including per capita GDP (PGDP), industrial structure (IND), innovation (RD), FDI, government intervention (GOV) and urbanization (URBAN) to calculate the propensity. The logit regression results are shown in Table 7 in the Appendix. According to the matching process, we obtain 3633 matched samples. We find that the coefficients of most variables are statistically significant at the 1% level and are thus significantly related to the implementation of the LCP policy.
We obtain the differences in the characteristics between pilots and non-pilots before and after matching, as shown in Appendix Table 8, and find significant differences before matching. After matching, these differences are acceptable, as verified by the t test in Appendix Table 8.
The results of sample comparison before and after matching are shown in Appendix Table 9. This shows that the differences of the samples after PSM are much smaller than those before PSM. The P value of the LR test is over 10%, which indicates that there is nonsignificant difference between pilot cities and matched non-pilot cities after matching. This illustrates that the samples are appropriate after PSM.
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Liu, C., Zhou, Z., Liu, Q. et al. Can a low-carbon development path achieve win-win development: evidence from China’s low-carbon pilot policy. Mitig Adapt Strateg Glob Change 25, 1199–1219 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11027-019-09897-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11027-019-09897-y