No abstract

Given the release of China's green financial policy, this paper constructs a quasi-natural experiment to investigate the impact of such policy on urban carbon emission efficiency and its impact mechanism. In 2016, seven ministries including the People's Bank of China jointly issued the Guidance on Building A Green Financial System, a milestone of the establishment of a more comprehensive green financial policy system in China. However, it is not a straight determinant of improved efficiency of carbon emissions. Based on the empirical panel data of 283 prefecture-level cities from 2011–2020, we adopted a DID model to examine the effect of green financial policies on urban carbon emission efficiency, where the treatment and control groups were divided according to their degrees of dependence on energy as influenced by green financial policies. The results indicated that green financial policies significantly and sustainably improved the carbon efficiency in these cities. Our mechanism further revealed that such improvement was achieved by technological innovation, accelerated industrial restructuring, and reduced energy consumption.

Based on China’s Industrial Robot and Customs data from 2006 to 2019, this paper conducts an empirical investigation into the impact of industrial robot usage on export trade structures and its working mechanism with the popularization of industrial robots and the expansion of export trade in China. It finds that the use of industrial robots has significantly increased the proportion of general trade, reduced that of processing trade and promoted the transformation from processing-trade into general-trade, or the impact mechanism of industrial robots on export trade structure. After adopting such two methods as lag phase and tool variables to address potential endogenous problems, the results continue to be valid. In addition, the paper also discussed the regional heterogeneity effect of industrial robot trade transformation. Such evidence provides a new perspective for developing countries to explain the transformation of their export trade and are of high significance in optimizing the structure of trade patterns and promoting the transformation of export trade.