Research on China’s Regional Economic Linkages: Based on the Analyses of Carbon Emission Transfers and Labor Mobility

In the face of the dual challenges of coordinated development of regional economy and sustainable development, strengthening the regional economic linkages is critical to realizing the coordinated development of the regional economy based on the reasonable transfer of carbon emissions. Under the background of industrial transfer, the authors used the inter-regional input–output model to measure the carbon emissions and labor transfers among 30 provinces in 2002, 2007 and 2010, analyzed the relationship between labor mobility and the spatial transfer of carbon emissions and introduced their scales and directions into a gravity model to measure the economic relations among regions. The results show that the embodied carbon emission tends to transfer from western and northeastern China to central and eastern China, which is consistent with the direction of labor mobility, and both of them show the feature of spatial clustering. Under the effects of carbon emission transfers and labor mobility, the radiation effects of the central node provinces in China such as Guangdong, Zhejiang, Hebei, Beijing, Henan and Gansu have given rise to the integrated regional spatial organizations of Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei, Yangtze River Delta Pan-Pearl River Delta and northwestern China, among which Yangtze River Delta and Pan-Pearl River Delta enjoy a relatively stable structure.