Regional differences and evolution trends of China’s industrial green transformation

Abstract

Green and low-carbon development is the direction of the current technological revolution and industrial transformation, while China is still in the historical stage of deep industrialization and has yet to completely break away from the high-input, high-consumption, and high-emission development method, and is still facing serious challenges in terms of improving the efficiency of resource utilization and reducing pollution emissions. To effectively promote China’s industrial green transformation, it is necessary to accurately grasp its development connotations and scientifically realize the measurement of industrial green transformation. Therefore, this paper measures the efficiency of China’s industrial green transformation, based on the directional distance function and the Global Malmquist-Luenberger (GML) index, to portray its distribution dynamics, regional differences and further identify its growth drivers. The results found that the overall efficiency of China’s industrial green transformation has been steadily increasing, and that the regional pattern is characterized by northwestern, northeastern, central, eastern and southwestern regions, in that order. The Markov chain estimates show that industrial green transformation efficiency is most likely to remain in its original state, with probabilities of 88.31%, 63.54%, 42.86%, and 75.61% for low, medium-low, medium-high, and high levels respectively, but also has a jump shift characteristic, with a certain possibility of falling back from the high-efficiency state to the low state. Dagum Gini coefficient estimation results show that differences between groups in the five major regions are the main source of the widening differences in the overall industrial green transformation, with the contribution remaining at around 60%. Further research suggests that economic growth, technological progress, foreign trade, and foreign direct investment (FDI) may lead to a widening of the efficiency gap in industrial green transformation, while the industrial structure and outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) help to reduce spatial differences to some extent. Based on the above conclusions, this paper proposes some countermeasures to promote the overall improvement and coordinated development of China’s industrial green transformation.