Carbon Emission Trading Policy and Carbon Emission Efficiency: An Empirical Analysis of China’s Prefecture-Level Cities

Abstract

Improving carbon emission efficiency is an important means to achieve pollution reduction and sustainable economic development. Rather than focusing on the implementation of market-incentive environmental policies in developed countries, we study the effect of the implementation of market-incentive environmental policies on the efficiency of carbon emissions in developing countries, which is generally ignored by frontiers researches. Based on panel data of 282 cities at prefecture-level and above in China from 2007 to 2017, we first adopt the non-radial distance function (NDDF) and global DEA model to measure the carbon emission efficiency of China’s cities. Then we take the Chinese carbon emission trading pilot as a quasi-natural experiment and explore the impact of carbon emission trading policy on carbon emission efficiency based on DID method. And the mechanisms are analyzed through the mediation effect model. It is found that the carbon emission rights trading policy can significantly improve the carbon emission efficiency of the pilot cities, and it mainly plays a role through three channels: technological progress effect, green innovation effect and energy consumption structure optimization effect. The heterogeneity test results show that for resource-based cities and cities with a higher degree of marketization, the carbon emission trading policy has a more obvious effect on improving carbon emission efficiency.