Cheng, H.; Li, F., and Mao, Q., 2015. The empirical analysis on the influence of CO₂ emission regulation on the export transformation of Chinese manufacturing industries.

Since China has begun to implement stringent CO₂ emission regulation, foreign trade competitiveness suffers from great impact. Under fixed emission regulation concerning different emission distribution methods, there exist differences in effects on export competitiveness as well as industrial transformation and upgrading. In this paper, based on the bilateral panel data of China and 32 trading partners during 1992 and 2011, model of multiple panel regression is applied to conduct empirical analysis on the influence of CO₂ emission regulation. The results show that the enhancement of CO₂ emission regulation is conducive to the improvement of the export competitiveness of Chinese manufacturing industries. Meanwhile, there are different influence degrees of regulation on various industries, among which the clean industry is the most influenced by the regulation. As for various manufacturing industries, there are three distribution policies, namely, emission distribution on the basis of output, average distribution on the basis of unit emission and accumulative distribution on the basis of unit emission. Moreover, the advantages and disadvantages of the influences of these three policies on export competitiveness, transformation and upgrading of Chinese manufacturing industries would be compared so as to determine which distribution policy is most beneficial. The results illustrate that “average CO₂ emission distribution on the basis of unit emission” makes the greatest contribution to the export transformation and upgrading of Chinese manufacturing industries, and it is in conformity with development need of Chinese trade at current phase. The innovation of the paper lies in its adoption of bilateral trade data to specifically study the influence of CO₂ emission regulation on trade competitiveness. The attention is specially attached to the performance differences of different emission distribution policies in trade competitiveness, which is the further exploration on the basis of previous studies.