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The impact of foreign direct investment on China’s industrial carbon emissions based on the threshold model

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Abstract

In recent years, the number of countries concerned about environmental protection continues to increase. With a continuous expansion of economic scale, many emerging markets are also sustainably enhancing their management for industrial carbon emissions in foreign direct investment (FDI). Therefore, the impact of FDI on the host country’s industrial carbon emissions has been a hot topic of researches. This study selects panel data of 30 medium and large cities in China from 2006 to 2019. Combined with dynamic panel GMM estimation and panel threshold model, this study empirically analyzes the impact factors of FDI on the host country’s industrial carbon emissions. This study is based on the perspective of dual environmental management systems. This study draws the following conclusions: When taking the dual environmental management system factors as threshold variables into the empirical research process, only the FDI in Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai shows a certain inhibitory effect on Chinese industrial carbon emissions. The FDI in other cities increases the scale of industrial carbon emissions. At the same time, in the formal environmental management system, FDI has no significant impact on China’s industrial carbon emissions. It indicates that the formal environmental management system of each city is not effective in policy formulation or implementation. In addition, the corresponding role of environmental management systems, such as innovation compensation and mandatory emission reduction, is not played. With the exception of Beijing and Shanghai, informal environmental management systems in other cities help curb the scale of industrial carbon emissions brought by FDI.

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Data availability

All datasets used and analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Funding

We thank funding supports from the Philosophy and Social Science Research Planning Project of Heilongjiang Province (No. 22GJB127), Heilongjiang Provincial Universities Basic Scientific Research Operation Fund Project of Heilongjiang University (No. 2022-KYYWF-1208), the Humanities and Social Science Project of the Ministry of Education of China (No. 20YJC790082), the Major Project of Party’s Political Construction Research Center of Ministry of Industry and of Information Technology of the People’s Republic of China (No. GXZY2107), and the National Social Science Fund of China (No.22CGL030).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Economics and Business Administration, Heilongjiang University, Harbin, China

    Chenggang Wang, Yue Zhu, He Wang & Shunyao Zhao

  2. School of Economics and Management, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin, China

    Tiansen Liu & Nan Liu

Authors
  1. Chenggang Wang
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  2. Tiansen Liu
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  3. Yue Zhu
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  4. He Wang
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  5. Shunyao Zhao
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  6. Nan Liu
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Data collection and analysis were performed by Nan Liu and Shunyao Zhao. Statistical analysis was performed by He Wang. Yue Zhu helped in the interpretation of the statistical data. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Chenggang Wang and Tiansen Liu. All authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Tiansen Liu.

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Wang, C., Liu, T., Zhu, Y. et al. The impact of foreign direct investment on China’s industrial carbon emissions based on the threshold model. Environ Sci Pollut Res 30, 65086–65101 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-023-26803-x

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