Impact of changes in energy structure and industrial structure on green total factor productivity in the context of environmental protection-evidence from China

Abstract

To achieve high-quality economic development in the process of promoting the development of China's environment quality, and green economy, green total factor productivity is an important indicator to measure high-quality economic development. Therefore, it is of great significance to study the impact of changes in energy and industrial structure on green total factors. Each specific province in China is taken as the research object, and the green total factor productivity index into green technology efficiency and green technology progress are decomposed in this paper. On the basis of constructing the industrial structure upgrading index and energy structure upgrading index, a fixed-effect model and threshold regression model are used to analyze the influence of industrial structure and energy structure on green total factor productivity and its internal mechanism. Results shows that green total factor productivity, industrial structure and energy structure all show a trend of "continuous rise in small fluctuations," but there is a spatial disequilibrium; the upgrading and optimization of industrial structure and energy structure can effectively promote the improvement of green total factor productivity, and the growth mainly comes from the improvement of green technology progress, not the improvement of green technology efficiency; the impact of the improvement of industrial structure and energy structure on green technology efficiency has a significant nonlinear trend of increasing marginal effect; the upgrading of the industrial structure has a stronger role in promoting green total factor productivity in the central and western regions than in the eastern region; while the optimization of the energy structure has a significant promoting effect on green total factor productivity in the eastern region, but has a certain inhibitory effect on the central and western regions.

Keywords: Environmental protection; Green technology efficiency (EC); Green technology progress (TC); Green total factor productivity (GTFP).