How can technology and efficiency alleviate the dilemma of economic growth and carbon emissions in China's industrial economy? A meta-frontier decoupling decomposition analysis.

This paper attempts to explore the decoupling relationship and its drivers between industrial economic increase and energy-related CO2 emissions (ICE). Firstly, the decoupling relationship was evaluated by Tapio index. Then, based on the DEA meta-frontier theory framework which taking into account the regional and industrial heterogeneity and index decomposition method, the driving factors of decoupling process were explored mainly from the view of technology and efficiency. The results show that during 2000e2019, weak decoupling was the primary state. Investment scale expansion was the largest reason hindering decoupling process of industrial increase from ICE. Both energy saving and production technology achieved significant progress, which facilitated the decoupling process. Simultaneously, the energy technology gap and production technology gap among regions have been narrowed, and played a role in promoting decoupling process. On the contrary, both scale economy efficiency and pure technical efficiency have inhibiting effects on decoupling process. The former indicates that the scale economy of China's industry was not conducive to improve energy efficiency and production efficiency, while the latter indicates that resource misallocation problem may exist in both energy market and product market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]