Carbon Sequestration Total Factor Productivity Growth and Decomposition: A Case of the Yangtze River Economic Belt of China

To find out whether carbon sequestration is both effective at mitigating climate change and promoting economic growth, in this paper, by adopting a stochastic frontier panel model with translog production function, carbon sequestration is incorporated into endogenous variables to establish estimation model of carbon sequestration total factor productivity (CSTFP) and examine CSTFP growth and its drivers decomposition of the Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB) of China in three estimations. The result shows that, (1) compared to traditional TFP growth, CSTFP growth in YREB is improved by 26.74 percentages (from -26.55% to 0.20%), contributed by three positive drivers of technical efficiency change (28.59%), technological progress change (18.55%), and scale efficiency change (3.99%); (2) different CSTFP growth exists in three watershed segments of YREB, which firstly is the upper reaches (0.62%), then the lower reaches (0.11%) and the middle reaches (-0.14%). Improved CSTFP growth owes to carbon sequestration's harmonious symbiosis where natural ecosystems and human activities are naturally blended while insufficient synergies are bottleneck for promotion of CSTFP growth in YREB. Related policy suggestions are provided in the end. The proposed analysis framework is efficient to disclose CSTFP growth in YREB, and can also be applied to similar analysis on CSTFP in regions and extended to multi-country/region analysis.