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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Environ. Sci.
Sec. Environmental Economics and Management
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2025.1564489
This article is part of the Research Topic Climate Risk and Green and Low-Carbon Transformation: Economic Impact and Policy Response View all 18 articles
Can Targeted Industrial Policy Drive Low-Carbon Transformation? Evidence from China's Five-Year Plans
Provisionally accepted- Fujian University of Technology, Fuzhou, China
Facing escalating climate challenges, the Chinese government has highlighted the importance of targeted industrial policy for driving low-carbon transformation within its Five-Year Plans, whose effectiveness warrants evaluation. This paper employs a fixed-effects model across provinces, industries, and years, adopting data from 36 sectors across 30 Chinese provinces from 1997 to 2019, to assess the impact of the targeted industrial policy on low-carbon transformation.We reveal that industries receiving targeted support exhibit a 9.2% higher low-carbon transformation index than those without. The effects of industrial policy on low-carbon transformation are more pronounced in the context of local government policy, recent Five-Year Plans, sectors with moderate to low technological complexity, and high-emission sectors.Mechanism analysis shows that industrial policy facilitates low-carbon transformation by structural effects and technological effects. These insights offer a foundation for refining industrial policy design and execution to achieve carbon neutrality goals and foster sustainable growth.
Keywords: Targeted industrial policy, Five-Year Plan, manufacturing, Low-carbon transformation, SBM-GML JEL Classification codes: O13, O25, Q01, Q56
Received: 21 Jan 2025; Accepted: 24 Mar 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Song, Yuan, Li and Zhang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Jianzhong Zhang, Fujian University of Technology, Fuzhou, China
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