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Top1. Introduction
The printing industry is a huge system with a long history and contains several segmented industries. Among these segmented industries, the publication printing industry has a large responsibility to spread excellent culture at home and abroad, plays an indispensable role in promoting a country’s traditional culture, and enhances a country’s soft power. Although emerging information technology has made phenomenal progress in recent years and has had a huge impact on publications, such as newspapers and periodicals, the impact of electronic publications has not shaken the status of the traditional publishing industry. According to an analysis by Guosheng Securities, the proportion of American e-book sales decreased from 24% to 14% between 2014 and 2018, and the proportion of British e-book sales decreased from 13% to 11%. In China, e-books and paper books shared a similar ratio of sales growth, and both of them had a stable market share (Guosheng Securities, 2019). This illustrates that book publications are not significantly impacted by emerging information technology. Since the Twelfth Five-year Plan, China’s publication printing industry has maintained a stable development trend, but there are still many problems in this industry, such as imbalanced industrial structure, irrational allocation of production resources, and low efficiency of enterprise operation. The report of the Nineteenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China made a major judgment that China’s economy has shifted from a stage of rapid growth to a stage of high-quality development and put forward urgent requirements for improving total factor productivity (TFP) (The Xinhua News Agency, 2017). As an important segment of the printing industry, production technology updates and production efficiency improvement of the publication printing industry are of great significance to promoting the quality and efficiency of China's printing industry and can help China move from a large printing country to a powerful printing country.
It is worth noting that while the publication printing industry produces knowledge and cultural content, it also consumes a large number of natural resources, such as wood, and causes serious environmental pollution. This is not in line with the current shift of China’s economy from a stage of rapid growth to a stage of high-quality development, the urgent requirement to increase TFP and the goal of accelerating the promotion of green and low-carbon development. In 2021, to proactively follow the global trend of green and low-carbon development, “Carbon Peak” was first included in the Chinese government's work report; that is, China's carbon dioxide emissions will no longer increase before 2030 and will gradually decrease after reaching the peak. In this context, it is necessary to pay attention to and study how to improve the TFP level of China’s publication printing industry under the premise of reducing energy consumption and protecting the environment.
This paper is organized as follows. The second section is the literature review. The third section is research method, which sets the production technology and the aggregate directional distance function (DDF) and introduces the Luenberger-Hicks-Moorsteen (LHM) TFP and its decomposition. The fourth section introduces the data and variable descriptions. The fifth section is the analysis of the empirical results. The last section is the research conclusions and policy recommendations.