Page 34 - Special Topic Session (STS) - Volume 2

STS452 Yang C. et al.
At present, a small number of scholars have studied China's foreign trade
and carbon emissions from the perspective of heterogeneity of firm ownership
and foreign trade mode (Dietzenbacher et al., 2012; Ma et al., 2015; Jiang et
al., 2016). However, it is noteworthy that the vigorous development of China's
economy in recent years has bred a large number of small and medium sized
firms. According to the data of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), the total
number of small and medium-sized firms accounting for 97% of the industrial
total firms in 2017, which dominates in terms of quantity . The data shows that
1
China's small and medium-sized firms have contributed 60% of China's GDP,
2
50% tax and 80% of urban employment in 2018 . Therefore, small and
medium-sized firms have become an important force in China's economy and
played a significant role in promoting the China's economy progress.
Accordingly, there are significant differences in the production structure,
technical level, import and export trade, energy consumption, carbon
emissions, and economic impact among firms of different size types. Under
this background, it is of great significance to study the respective roles in
China’s economy and the contributions on the value-added and trade-
embodied carbon emission patterns of different sized firms. Therefore, based
on the non-competitive table, we construct an extended Chinese input-output
model (LMS model) for the year 2012, considering the heterogeneity of firm
size, to explore the value-added as well as trade-embodied carbon emission
of different sized firms in China. This study may provide some differentiated
policy implications at firm level on the following issues: What are the
respective roles of different sized firms in China's economy and environment?
Are there any significant differences in the value-added among large, medium
and small firms? Who is the main driving force of China’s trade-embodied
carbon emissions?

2. Methodology
2.1 LMS model
The traditional Chinese input-output model does not concern the type
of firm size, but there are significant differences in production technology,
energy efficiency and import and export among the big, medium and
small-sized firms. Therefore, an extended input-output model capturing
the heterogeneity of firm size is constructed in our study, based on the
2012 non-competitive input-output table. The model distinguishes the
large, medium and small firms of industrial sectors, abbreviated as LMS
model (Table 1).

1 Available at: http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjsj/ndsj/2018/indexch.htm
2 Available at: http://www.gov.cn/guowuyuan/2018-08/20/content _5315204.htm

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