Migration of manufacturing industries and transfer of carbon emissions embodied in trade: empirical evidence from China and Thailand.

At present, China's carbon emissions rank first in the world, which not only brings huge challenges to the sustainable development of China's economy, but also brings more pressure from public opinion in the international community. With the outward migration of China's manufacturing industries to Southeast Asia, the carbon emissions embodied in trade has also been transferred. These trends provide a good opportunity to analyze the characteristics of transnational industrial restructuring and spatial structure transformation of carbon emissions between China and Southeast Asian countries. In 2020, ASEAN has become China's largest trading partner, and Thailand, due to its unique industrial structure and investment environment, will surely become one of the main ASEAN countries to undertake the transfer of China's manufacturing industry. Over the years, the shift of carbon emissions by the continuous transfer of a large number of basic manufacturing industries from China to Thailand promoted the release of China's carbon emission pressure. In this article, on the basis of the data of import and export commodities between China and Thailand from 2012 to 2017, the input-output model is carried out to analyze the energy consumption of China's various industries, and three periods, namely 2012, 2015, and 2017, are used to be key periods to calculate the embodied carbon of China's manufacturing migration and Sino-Thailand trade. The empirical results show that the transfer of China's manufacturing to Thailand from 2012 to 2017 has continued to rise. The transfer of Chinese manufacturing to Thailand is positively correlated with the carbon emissions of trade between the two countries, which has promoted the relief of China's pressure on energy conservation and emission reduction. Therefore, government departments should formulate differentiated and stable domestic manufacturing policies, spend on the development of advanced manufacturing industries with low energy consumption and high technology density, and encourage the relocation of industries with low technology density and high-carbon emissions to effectively reduce environmental pressure in China.