Research On China’s Carbon Emissions Embodied In Foreign Trade

During the period of the reform and opening-up policy was carried out in the last forty years,China has experienced the rapid economic growth and got the remarkable achievements in foreign trade.In 2018,China’s total foreign trade value was as high as 30.51 trillion yuan,with the trade surplus of 2.33 trillion yuan and the annual increase rate of 9.7%,and then became the largest trading nation in the world.However,there are also a series of problems under the above high-growth economic pattern.The development mode which relies on high energy consumption,high emissions and high resource input has made it is more and more difficult for China to keep the further increase in foreign trade and realize the sustainable development in economy.The report of the 19 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China has clearly pointed out that China’s economy has shifted from the stage of rapid growth to high-quality development.The pressures of large energy consumption and carbon emission control have brought up new demands for the policy adjustment of China’s foreign trade.Based on the market mechanism,the low-carbon economy uses efficient energy technology,renewable energy technology,greenhouse gas emission reduction technology,industrial transformation,and other means to reduce energy consumption with high carbon emissions as much as possible,and then realize the coordination of economic development and environmental protection.In 2015,China signed the Paris Agreement and made four major commitments to the United Nations,and three of them are quantitative targets related to carbon emissions and fossil energy consumption.In order to achieve the above targets,it is necessary to make clear China’s overall carbon emissions.The carbon emissions embodied in China’s foreign trade are very large because of the large trade scale and a large number of international industrial transfer which has undertaken during the economic development.Therefore,measuring this part of carbon emissions,and then adjusting and controlling its development trend are very important for China to realize the emission-related targets and form the new ideas for foreign trade development.The main research contents and conclusions of this paper are as follows:Firstly,this paper calculated the total carbon intensity of China’s foreign trade in all industrial sectors.The sector of petroleum,coking,gas and nuclear fuel has the highest total carbon intensity.Secondly,this paper calculated the carbon emissions of each industrial sector embodied in the foreign trade.Generally speaking,China’s import carbon emissions is slightly larger than that of export.Thirdly,this paper performed the factor decomposition analysis of the carbon emission changes embodied in China’s foreign trade,and then identified the driving and lagging factors.Fourthly,this paper forecasted the future development of carbon emissions embodied in China’s foreign trade,and analyzed its change trend before 2025.Fifthly,this paper puts forward some suggestions on the policy adjustment of China’s foreign trade and major industrial sectors.Trade in services should be developed vigorously according to the present national plans.The primary policy direction for trade in products should be transferring the manufacturing industry and the subordinate policy directions are breaking down the export barriers of developed countries and changing the government ideas.Carbon tariffs can be considered as an important tool of China in international negotiations.The core policy direction of chemical industry is to upgrade the industry,and then improve efficiency and added value.The major policy direction for the sector of petroleum,coking,gas and nuclear fuel processing is to limit the development of the petroleum processing industry and to ensure energy security by increasing oil reserves.The main innovations of this paper are as follows: Firstly,this paper brought forward that trade in services has become the major driver of the increase of China’s carbon emissions embodied in foreign trade.The trade deficit in services enlarged the emission scale embodied in foreign trade,and then reduced the carbon emissions of China.Secondly,for carbon emissions embodied in both export and import,the impacts of changes in economic scale are far larger than these in total carbon intensity and degree of dependence on foreign trade.Changes of carbon emissions embodied in import are contributed by many industrial sectors,but these embodied in export only come from chemical industry,non-metallic mineral products industry,and a few other sectors.Several advanced methods are used in this paper.Firstly,reasonable structural equation and decomposition algorithms were used to perform the factor decomposition to the changes of China’s carbon emissions embodied in foreign trade,and the contribution of each industrial sector was also measured.This paper designed a factor structural equation which is consistent with the actual situations,and adopted the Laspeyres index decomposition and LMDI algorithms to measure the contribution of each factor in changing China’s carbon emissions embodied in foreign trade.Besides,based on the quantitative results of carbon emissions embodied in each sector,this paper measured the contribution of each sector in changing China’s carbon emissions embodied in foreign trade.Secondly,based on the trend characteristics of China’s carbon emissions embodied in foreign trade,this paper adopted trend extrapolation equations to forecast the future changes of the above emissions.Combined with the decomposition result of each factor,the scenario forecasting was also performed.Carbon emissions embodied in foreign trade only have a few samples,and present unstable trends.Considering these characteristics,the paper selected the polynomial equation and hybrid trend equation as basic algorithms,and adopted the combined forecasting results of the above two algorithms as the trend extrapolation results.Furthermore,based on the rend extrapolation results and also considering the factor decomposition results,this paper designed 4 development scenarios to forecast China’s future carbon emissions embodied in foreign trade.