China's low carbon competitiveness: an assessment based on international comparison

Today, national competitiveness has evolved into the low carbon competitiveness. This paper attempts to assess China's low carbon competitiveness, measure the overall level of China's low carbon competitiveness based on international comparisons, and then offer some recommendations to improve China's low carbon competitiveness. Specially, it includes: 1) the concept of national low carbon competitiveness is defined; 2) a new national low carbon competitiveness index is designed, which is made up of two comprehensive indexes, national low carbon development ability and national low carbon constraints; 3) the corresponding evaluation system and calculation method are built. National low carbon development ability mainly includes the ability of national economic growth, the ability of national low carbon technology development and the ability of governmental low carbon management. And national low carbon constraints include saturating force of energy consumption and carbon emission, national environmental carrying capacity and national expansion capability of consumption; 4) 19 countries with relatively strong global competitiveness and international influence are selected for low carbon competitiveness assessment. The results show that China's low carbon competitiveness ranks 18 in the 19 countries; 5) several suggestions to enhance China's low carbon competitiveness are proposed.