Research on the impact of technical progress on the carbon productivity in China’s service industry

The energy consumption and carbon emission of the service industry should not be ignored. In order to achieve green and low-carbon development, improving the carbon productivity of the service industry is an extremely important method, and technical progress is a key path to improving the carbon productivity of the service industry. This paper decomposes the technical progress of China’s service industry into technical progress of non-energy factors and technical progress of energy factor, and analyzes the impact and action mechanism of these two technical progress on the carbon productivity of China’s service industry respectively from the theoretical and empirical perspectives. The main conclusions of this paper are as follows: From 2003 to 2019, technical progress had a significant positive impact on the carbon productivity of China’s service industry. The influence coefficients of technical progress of non-energy factors and technical progress of energy factor are 0.285 and 0.306. In terms of the type of technical progress, the technical progress of energy factor has a greater impact. The technical progress of non-energy factors and energy factor have a significant promoting effect on the improvement of carbon productivity of service industry in all regions of China. In Eastern, central and Western China, the influence coefficients of the former are 0.318, 0.289 and 0.266, and the influence coefficients of the latter are 0.352, 0.296 and 0.273. The mechanism test finds that the technical progress of non-energy factors and energy factor directly affect the carbon productivity of China’s service industry on the one hand, and indirectly affect the carbon productivity of China’s service industry through the production efficiency and energy use efficiency of the service industry on the other hand.