Improving the carbon emission efficiency in the power industry is a crucial step to achieve China's "double carbon" goal. Carbon emission trading (CET) is an important tool for carbon emission reduction in the power industry. This paper collects data on the power industry of 30 provinces in China from 2005 to 2020 and applies an undesirable super-efficiency epsilon-based measure (EBM) model to measure the total-factor carbon emission efficiency of the power industry (CEEP). A spatial difference-in-differences (SDID) model is constructed to analyze the spatial spillover effects of China's CET on CEEP. Then, a spatial mediating effect model is employed to explore the influence mechanism of CET. The results show that (1) during the sample period, CEEP shows a trend of fluctuating growth, and the overall level of CEEP is still relatively low; (2) CET has a significant promotion effect on CEEP, resulting in an average increase of 6.02% in the efficiency value of the pilot areas; (3) the spatial spillover effect test proves that CET not only improves the CEEP in the pilot areas, but also promotes the improvement of CEEP in the adjacent areas; and (4) the influence mechanism test shows that CET can improve CEEP by reducing energy intensity, promoting technological progress, and upgrading industrial structure. This study provides a new perspective for the measurement of CEEP and expands the research on the emission reduction effect of CET in the power industry. Finally, based on the research results, this study proposes targeted suggestions to provide reference for the government to formulate emission reduction policies.
Keywords: Carbon emission trading; EBM model; Mediating effect; Power industry; SDID model; Total-factor carbon emission efficiency.
© 2023. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.