This paper investigates the development trends and variation characteristics of China's economy, energy consumption and carbon emissions from 2007 to 2030, and the impacts on China's economic growth, energy consumption, and carbon emissions under the carbon tax policy scenarios, based on the dynamic computable general equilibrium (CGE) model. The results show that during the simulation period, China's economy will keep a relatively high growth rate, but the growth rate will slow down under the benchmark scenario. The energy consumption intensity and the carbon emissions intensity per unit of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) will continually decrease. The energy consumption structure and industrial structure will gradually optimize. With the economic growth, the total energy consumption will constantly increase, and the carbon dioxide emissions are still large, and the situation of energy-saving and emission-reduction is still serious. The carbon tax is very important for energy-saving and emission-reduction and energy consumption structure optimization, and the effect of the carbon tax on GDP is small. If the carbon tax could be levied and the enterprise income tax could be reduced at the same time, the dual goals of reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions and increasing the GDP growth can be achieved. Improving the technical progress level of clean power while implementing a carbon tax policy is very meaningful to optimize energy consumption structure and reduce the carbon emissions, but it has some offsetting effect to reduce energy consumption.
OPEN ACCESSSustainability 2014, 6 488
This paper explores the effect of China’s emission trading scheme (ETS) pilot policy implemented during 2013-2014 on carbon emission performance. Adopting the Difference-in-Difference (DID) model, we find that: 1) China’s ETS pilot policy can significantly improve the carbon emission performance of listed companies in the pilot provinces. 2) The heterogeneity analysis shows that the carbon emission performance of listed companies in the eastern coastal pilot areas has improved significantly, which is not significant in the central and western pilot areas. 3) We find that China’s ETS pilot policy can significantly improve innovation capabilities of listed companies, suggesting that innovation is a channel for the impact of the China’s ETS pilot policy on carbon emission performance in the pilot provinces. Overall, our study shows that ETS pilot policy has played a governance role in China and improved carbon emission performance. We further highlight some important policy implications with respect to helping companies save energy and reduce emissions, and promoting the further improvement of China’s ETS pilot policy.
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