Does Chinese Industries’ Status in GVC Affect Its Carbon Emission Intensity?

Abstract

Recently the division of labor, caused by economic globalization, makes big difference to the whole world economy. The traditional inter-industry division gradually transfers to intra-industry division during one certain production process. Developing countries have to face serious environmental problems and pressure of huge carbon emissions. Based on literatures about GVC and carbon emission intensity, this paper chooses 38 industries as research sample and uses data from 2004 to 2014 to measure the annual carbon emission intensity and index of GVC status of different Chinese industries. Finally, we found that the higher the index of GVC status, the lower the carbon intensity. TIFA is negatively correlated with carbon emission intensity, while adjusting energy consumption structure and increasing FDI in high-carbon industries are beneficial to reduce the carbon emission intensity. Introduction With the deepening of economic globalization and international division of labor, the participation of developing countries in global industrial competition and cooperation has brought about not only the rapid economic development but also the rising level of domestic carbon emissions and environmental pollution. Under the background of advocating green economy and sustainable development worldwide, it is urgent to alleviate domestic carbon emissions and realize the transformation and upgrading of industries and the whole economy. As the second largest economy in the world, China's participation in the global value chain has undergone a typical process of initial participation in a passive mode, gradual involvement in an active mode, coexistence of two modes of participation and their changing proportions and fluctuations in the status of international division of labor. Based on relevant literatures and empirical studies about global value chain and carbon emission intensity at home and abroad, this paper calculates the annual carbon emission intensity and its global value chain status of 38 subdivision industries. Further, we empirically studied the influence of the position of industries in global value chain on the carbon emission intensity and puts forward carbon emission reduction strategies of our country from the perspective of global value chain and industrial upgrading. This research can help decision-makers to examine the characteristics of carbon emission intensity of various industries from macro perspective, which is helpful to promote green development and solve outstanding environmental problems. The Model According to existing researches, carbon emission intensity of different industries can also be affected by many factors, such as energy structure, technological level, industrial scale and industrial openness. According to the theory of global value chain, the higher the position of the industry in the value chain, the more dependence on technology and capital elements, thus the carbon emission level is relatively low. Therefore, we comprehensively consider a series of control factors and construct the following measurement model: ∗ ∗ (1) is the carbon emission intensity of industry i at the t period, is the global value chain International Conference on Advanced Education, Management and Humanities (AEMH 2019) Copyright © 2019, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 352