Carbon emissions performance trend across Chinese cities: evidence from efficiency and convergence evaluation
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Carbon emissions performance trend across Chinese cities: evidence from efficiency and convergence evaluation Kai Tang 1 & Chun Xiong 2 & Yiting Wang 1 & Di Zhou 3 Received: 24 April 2020 / Accepted: 12 August 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Improving carbon emissions performance in Chinese cities is a crucial way to promote China’s sustainable development. Employing the super-efficiency SBM model, we first estimate the carbon emissions efficiency (CEE) of 262 Chinese cities from 2003 to 2016. Then we study and explain the club convergence of CEE combining Markov and spatial Markov models and Moran’s I test method. The results show that CEE has improved, especially for the western and northeastern cities. The efficiency of the northwest cities is low, while those of the central and coastal cities are relatively high. Club convergence exists in China’s urban CEE. Cities with high- and low-level efficiency have much higher convergence levels. There are significant spatial agglomeration and spillover effects in China’s urban CEE, contributing to the club convergence. Our analysis suggests that “cross-border” cooperation and communication between cities in different clubs should be highly promoted. Cities in high-level efficiency clubs are encouraged to play its role in radiating the lower-level cities. And the Chinese government is encouraged to strengthen carbon emissions mitigation in low-level areas through combining the green “Belt and Road” construction with the establishment of a national carbon market. Keywords Carbon emissions efficiency . Club convergence . Markov model . Spatial Markov model . Super SBM model . Chinese cities
Introduction The path to rapid economic growth in China since the 1980s is engraved by fast CO2 emissions increase. Globally, China has been considered to be the second largest economy and largest CO2 emitter during the last decade. In 2018, it produced 15.8% of global gross domestic product (GDP) and emitted 29.3% of global greenhouse gases (GHG) (International Monetary Fund 2019; BP 2019). At present, China is struggling with reducing high CO2 emissions and keeping fast growth simultaneously as a response to its ambitious Responsible Editor: Eyup Dogan * Di Zhou [email protected] 1
School of Economics and Trade, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou 510006, China
2
School of Statistics, Tianjin University of Finance and Economics, Tianjin 300222, China
3
School of Mathematics and Statistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou 510006, China
sustainable development targets. To be concrete, this country tries to abate its CO2 emissions per unit of GDP by 60–65% before 2030 compared with 2005 level and keeps the annual GDP growth rate higher than 6% (State Council 2019). It has been widely recognized that improving carbon emissions performance is a crucial way to reduce CO2 emissions during economic activities and promote sustainable development (Tang et al. 2016a; Yang et al. 2018; Chen a
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