The Development of Low Carbon Economy and the Policies of Environmental Protection Under Selective Opening

Abstract

Since the reform and opening up of the economy, the Yangtze River Delta Area has not only been experiencing rapid economic growth but also facing many problems about environmentally sustainable development. This paper makes an empirical research on the influence that economic opening up has on the ecological environment of the Yangtze River Delta area, using regional panel data and survey data of micro-enterprises. It turns out that on one hand, along with industrial transfer of manufacturing industry in developed countries, the energy consumption and all kinds of pollutant emission tend to rise; on the other hand, low carbon idea and responsibility of protecting the environment have spread among the global value chain and that does help increase the environment performance of enterprises which embed themselves into the global value chain, so as to improve regional environmental quality macroscopically. According to the empirical results above, we raise feasible countermeasure thoughts about how to develop low carbon economy and protect environment in an open economy, based on the background of the Yangtze River Delta area’s embedding into the global value chain and enterprises’ behavior characteristics at micro level.