Does political resource endowment promote carbon productivity? A case study of counties along the Long March areas in China.

whether political resource endowment affect regional low-carbon economic development has attracted the attention of many relevant stakeholders. Given that, by using remote sensing data such as nighttime light data and introducing the spatial econometric models, this paper selected 519 counties covering 69 prefecture-level cities in China's 14 provinces to explore the impact of political resource endowment on carbon productivity at the county level. The results showed that regional carbon productivity along the Long March areas was more 12% higher than that along non-Long March areas. Moreover, a series of robustness tests also verify that political resource endowment can effectively promote regional carbon productivity. Additionally, regional industrial structure is the most significant influencing factor in reducing carbon productivity. Our results also showed economic benefits generated from per unit carbon emissions in these counties along the Long March areas were obviously higher than those of counties along the non-Long March areas, indicating that counties along non-Long March areas should pay more attention to improving the balanced development of economic growth and environmental protection. Finally, for counties along the Long March areas and their surrounding regions, their carbon productivity spatially presents the typical spatial autocorrelation trend. Therefore, it is necessary to combine the transformation of industrial structure with the optimization of industrial spatial layout, and formulate the targeted improvement plan on carbon productivity for counties along the Long March areas to achieve coordinated low-carbon development. • The impact of political resource endowment on regional carbon productivity is explored; • Carbon productivity of counties along the Long March areas is higher than that of other counties; • Industrial structure hindered the growth of carbon productivity along the non-Long March areas; • Carbon productivity of counties benefitted from the endowment of political resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]