低碳战略能否增强城市经济发展与生态环境的协调性——基于低碳城市试点的准自然实验

Can Low-carbon Strategy Enhance the Coordination between Economic Development and Ecological Environment:Quasi-natural Experiments Based on Low-carbon City Pilot Policy

推行低碳城市试点政策是落实低碳战略的具体实践,剖析其实施效果可为识别低碳战略的实施价值提供重要的经验证据支撑。基于2005—2019年284个地级城市的数据,将低碳城市试点政策作为一项准自然实验,运用双重差分法考察低碳战略对城市经济发展与生态环境协调性的影响效应和作用机制,发现低碳战略通过促进绿色技术创新、优化产业结构和提升能源利用效率三条路径能显著增强城市经济发展与生态环境的协调性;分组回归结果表明,低碳城市试点的政策效应因城市区位、资源禀赋及人口规模不同而表现出明显的异质性;调节效应分析表明,提升人力资本能显著增强低碳城市试点政策效应,反映出低碳战略与人力资本的协同具有良好的经济和生态效益。因而应以低碳城市建设为抓手,全面落实低碳战略部署;以经济发展与生态环境协调为导向,充分利用低碳政策工具;以区域差异性为依据,精准助力低碳目标实现。

The implementation of low-carbon city pilot policy is a concrete practice of the low-carbon strategy;analysis of its effects helps to provide sufficient empirical evidence for identifying the effects of the low-carbon strategy.Based on the data of 284 cities at prefecture-level and above from 2005 to 2019,this paper regards the low-carbon city pilot policy as quasi-natural experiments,and uses the difference-in-difference method to evaluate the impact of low-carbon strategy on the coordination of economic development and ecological environment.The results show that low-carbon strategy can significantly improve the coordination between economic development and ecological environment through promoting green technology innovation,optimizing industrial structure and improving energy efficiency.The grouping regression results show that the effects of the low-carbon city pilot policy have obvious heterogeneity in cities with different locations,resource endowments and population sizes.The moderating effect analyses show that the promotion of human capital can strengthen the effects of the low-carbon city pilot policy,reflecting that the synergy of low-carbon strategy and human capital has effective benefits both in economy and ecology.Therefore,we should focus on the building of low-carbon cities and comprehensively implement the low-carbon strategy,fully apply lowcarbon policy tools guided by the coordination of economic development and ecological environment,and accurately assist in achieving low-carbon goals according to regional differences.