Can Industrial Structural Adjustment Improve the Total-Factor Carbon Emission Performance in China?

How to improve the industrial total-factor carbon emission performance (TCPI), or total-factor carbon productivity, through industrial structural adjustment, is crucial to China’s energy conservation and emission reduction and sustainable growth. In this paper, we use a dynamic spatial panel model to empirically analyze the effect of industrial structural adjustment on TCPI of 30 provinces in China from 2000 to 2015. The results show that most of the provinces with high TCPI are located in the eastern coastal areas, while the provinces with relatively low TCPI are to be found in the central and western regions. The spatial auto-correlation tests show that there are significant global spatial auto-correlation and local spatial agglomeration characteristics in TCPI. The regression results of the dynamic spatial panel models show that at the national level, the structure of industrialization, the industrial structure of heavy industrialization, the coal-based energy consumption structure and the endowment structure have significant negative effects on the improvement of TCPI. The expansion of industrial enterprise scale, on the other hand, is conducive to an improvement in TCPI while the effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) structure and ownership structure on TCPI are not significant. At the regional level, there are certain differences in the effects of different types of industrial structural adjustment on TCPI.