Taking advantage of a 2005-2018 sample of 86 Chinese steel enterprises (CSEs) and the difference-in-differences method, this paper utilizes the carbon emissions trading scheme (ETS) - as a quasi-natural experiment to investigate the impact of the carbon ETS on the total factor pollution control efficiency (TFPCE) of CSEs to test the green development effect of the carbon ETS. Then, the green development effect of the carbon ETS is empirically tested by a variety of robustness tests, such as DDD and PSM-DID. The results show that the carbon ETS policy significantly improves the TFPCE of CSEs lo...