Heliyon (Feb 2024)
The impact of FDI on energy conservation and emission reduction performance: A FDI quality perspective
Abstract
According to the climate emission reduction commitment of the Paris Agreement, all countries are actively seeking a new path of energy conservation and emission reduction, and trying to ''bend downward'' the global greenhouse gas emission curve. For China's carbon peak before 2030 and carbon neutral target before 2060, explore whether FDI can reduce China's energy consumption and carbon emissions. From the new research perspective of FDI quality, this paper explores the potential ways to improve regional energy-carbon emission performance (ECEP), and applied dynamic threshold effect and two-stage least squares for validation. The specific results are as follows: FDI quality improvement can have a significant positive impact on regional ECEP.The development level of renewable energy, the optimization of industrial structure and the enhancement of green innovation ability can positively regulate the impact of FDI on energy-carbon emission performance. At the same time, the results of the dynamic panel threshold model demonstrate that with the economic growth pressure of local governments decreases and the fiscal decentralization increases, the role of FDI quality in promoting the ECEP could be stronger. The influence of FDI quality on ECEP has regional heterogeneity, and the influence of FDI quality on ECEP is regional heterogeneous, and the influence of FDI quality on ECEP is more significant in inland and midwestern regions than in coastal and eastern regions. This study provides experience for FDI to formulate the quality assessment system and formulate foreign investment policy.