Regional disparity, spatial spillover effects of urbanisation and carbon emissions in China

Carbon emissions become serious accompanying the urbanisation, which may damage the global environment through gas flow and other spatial spillover effects. Thus, it is important to study the spatial interactive effects of urbanisation and other factors on carbon emissions. Considering the rapid urbanisation in China, this paper studies the regional disparity and spatial spillover effects of urbanisation and carbon emissions of China. The law of geography is introduced to explain the mechanism of spatial effects of carbon emission theoretically. By combining STIRPAT model with spatial Dubin model, the spatial interactive effects among both independent variables and dependent variables can be clarified empirically. The results show that: (1) Technological limitation, wealth and population are the driving factors of carbon emissions, and are the most influential factors in the East, Middle and West parts of China in turn. (2) As urbanisation improves, its influence on local carbon emissions changes from positive to negative and then the negative influence becomes weaker. (3) Carbon emissions have strong spatial spillover effects among provinces. (4) Urbanisation, technology, wealth and population levels have different spatial interactive effects on carbon emissions in different parts of China. Accordingly, the influences of urbanisation and other factors on carbon emissions vary substantially among regions and have spatial spillover effects among provinces, suggesting different policies for different regions with different surroundings to reduce carbon emissions. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.