碳中和背景下的中国经济低碳转型: 特征事实与机制分析

Transiting to a low-carbon economy for carbon neutrality while promoting economic growth is one of the key issues facing China to address climate change and sustainable development. At the United Nations General Assembly in September 2020, China has pledged to peak carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. The thought-provoking questions are as follows: how should China make strateqic plans according to the national low-carbon development strategy, and make use of mechanisms such as emission reduction regulation, technological innovation and industrial transformation to promote the goal of carbon neutrality? How will the target constraint of carbon neutrality affect the path of China’s future economic growth and transformation? Understanding how different carbon emission reduction mechanisms influence each other and how they affect economic growth and transformation are theoretical issues that need to be answered urgently in the academic community. A theoretical analysis of these issues is the main objective of this paper.
This paper uses provincial panel data to empirically examine the stylized facts of China’s low-carbon transition. Carbon pricing, emission efficiency improvement and capital restructuring are robust mechanisms for low-carbon transition. A green growth model is developed to specify the interactions between carbon-intensive capital, clean capital, cumulative carbon stocks and the social cost of carbon emissions. The model analyzes the mechanism through which low-carbon transition could proceed, with a focus on the effects of carbon pricing, efficiency improvement and capital restructuring on transitional dynamics of green growth. The calibrated model is used to quantitatively simulate the time path of low-carbon transition under different scenarios with the carbon neutrality goal.
The main findings are that carbon pricing, emission efficiency improvement, and capital restructuring are three important mechanisms through which low-carbon transition can meet the goal of carbon neutrality. The three mechanisms are differentiated but complementary. Carbon pricing that captures the social costs of carbon emission creates a price incentive mechanism of low-carbon transition to limit the use of high-carbon assets and carbon emissions. However, the economic constraint of carbon pricing incurs transition costs such as stranded assets. Emission efficiency improvement reduces the carbon intensity through the learning-by-doing effect, thereby mitigating carbon emission increases as the size of production scale expands. Capital restructuring acts to expand the share of low-carbon capital and shrink that of high-carbon capital, which helps limit emissions caused by economic growth and mitigate transition costs incurred by carbon pricing. These three mechanisms can work cohesively and contribute to endogenous growth in the context of carbon neutrality. While striving to achieve the net-zero emission goal, production, consumption, and investment can continue to grow, and the target of carbon emission reduction will not lead to an outcome of growth stagnation.
The policy implications drawn from our research are that low-carbon transition towards carbon neutrality lies in coordinating carbon pricing, emission efficiency improvement and low-carbon industrial restructuring. First, it is important to strengthen the building of carbon markets by expanding sectoral coverages of the carbon market to reflect the scarcity of emission quotas. By doing so, the market can form the expectation of low-carbon asset value appreciation and creates the incentive for low-carbon technical upgrading of high-carbon enterprises. Second, it is also important to think about the way to achieve carbon neutrality from the perspective of improving production technology and emission efficiency. The power industry must reduce the emission intensity by promoting clean technologies such as wind and solar energy. For manufacturing that inevitably uses fossil energy in production, it is necessary to promote the use of high-efficiency equipment and carbon capture and storage technologies for maintaining the asset value of high-carbon capital. Third, it is important to establish an incentive mechanism to guide capital investment towards low-carbon industries, and foster green industries such as renewable energy, clean production, energy conservation and pollution control. By restricting high-carbon industries and directing investment towards low-carbon industries, low-carbon industrial restructuring will not only help achieve the carbon neutrality goal but also create a new engine for economic growth.
This paper contributes to green growth literature which mainly focuses on factors of low-carbon economic transition from the empirical perspective. There is a lack of theoretical works analyzing the mechanism of green growth for carbon neutrality. To our knowledge, this paper for the first time explores the mechanism of China’s low-carbon transition for the target of carbon neutrality. Our paper contributes to a detailed exposition of the general equilibrium effect of carbon pricing, emission efficiency improvement, and capital restructuring on low-carbon transition. It also makes numerical simulation and quantitative evaluation of the time path and inherent characteristics of China’s low-carbon transition. Our paper thus contributes to a thorough understanding of low-carbon transition for carbon neutrality through the lens of empirical testing, theoretical analysis, and quantitative simulation.