| Whether the human's activity is an important factor of contributing to climate change has been the focus of the debate which involves world experts and scholars for a long time. From Swedish chemist Arrhenius, the 1 896 Nobel Prize winner 'in chemistry, put forward the science assumption of climate change, who thought"fossil fuel burning will increase atmospheric concentration of CO2, which can lead to global warming", by 1990 the United Nations intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) first released the climate change assessment report, again in 2007 the fourth assessment report were published, scientists constantly excavate a new powerful evidence that global climate change is happening, and is closely linked with the influence of human activity. As people pay more attention to climate warming, the pace to confront climate change is accelerating, all kinds of multilateral or bilateral activity are increasing, and multilateral or bilateral agreements and negotiations of further curbing or slowing climate warming grows day by day.Over the past 30 years (1978-2008) ,China, whose annual ecnomic growth keeps 9.7% on average, is one of the 13 economic entities keeping more than 7%of annual growth rate for more than 25 years since world war ? (The Growth Commission, 2008). But behind the remarkable economic growth is ecological environment deterioration, natural resources consumption and CO2 emissions of height. According to the international energy agency (IEA, 2009), China emitted 6.08 billion tons of CO2 in 2007,ranking the first in the world,and China is expected to reach 9.6 billion tons and 11.6 billion tons of CO2 in 2020 and 2030 respectively, accounting for 27.83% and 28.86% of the total amount of the global carbon emissions respectively. Global vision is locking to China coincidentally for its high carbon emissions growth, so that China is becoming the world's target, and facing a growing reduction pressure. Although the United Nations framework convention on climate change (UNFCCC) thinks that developing countries at present do not participate in emissions reduction, and China, as a developing country , still does not have mandatory obligation of cutting emissions. But to defend the rights has been more and more difficult. In the past international negotiations on climate change, many western developed countries have directly orindirectly put forward that China should be brought into a substantial reduction targets of CO2 emissions and required to control and undertake the cutting carbon emissions for many times.Since china's reform and opening up policy, especially after its entry into the WTO, China's foreign trade has grown rapidly. During 30 years, our total volume of import and export trade has increased by more than 100 times, with an average annual growth rate as high as 18%, and has became the world's second largest trading nation.The highly growth of international trade promote the high speed development of our economy, but this extensive growth mode is at the cost of domestic energy, resource consumption, environment pollution and GHG emissions. Recent studies reveal the international trade and the global GHG emissions are closely related. China's highly growth of GHG emissions are largely belonged to the process of meeting the needs of western developed countries, that is,through massive exports of cheap products. Therefore,blind criticism of China on global warming is obviously not objective and unjust, developed countries should also have unshirkable responsibility for China's growing GHG emissions.At present, the studies of international trade and carbon emissions in our country are just at its beginning. Due to the restrictions of data availability and immature estimation methods , there is a large divergence in calculated results.Based on the above considerations, This paper sets the international trade index as the breakthrough point when researching on China's carbon emissions and tries to answer the following questions: (1) whether china is also a huge CO2 emissions country behind the huge foreign trade? In the long run, whether we are net implied carbon emissions of exporters for the trade surplus situation accused by the western developed countries? (2) in China's foreign trade, what is the respectively amount of the embodied carbon emissions in import, export and net exports trade?(3) what is the respectively amount of the embodied carbon emissions in import,export and net exports of various industries of department? What if classified by three industries? (4) what are the factors which affecting embodied carbon emissions in China's foreign trade? to what degree? which one is playing a dominant role?The thesis consists of six chapters:Chapter one is introduction. This part introduces the significance of the study,the meaning of the research, the mentality and the method of the research, the arrangement of the contents, the technological routine, and the renovation points.Chapter two is literature review. To begin with. focused on the relationship between international trade and environmental pollution. this chapter analyzes three points of views in regard with the influences of the global trade liberalization on the environment. Then it discusses respectively a controversial issue on the carbon emissions in global trade that who should be blamed for the carbon emissions in global trade—the producers, the consumers or both of them? Besides,the chapter summarizes the application of the life cycle analysis and the input-output analysis in the embodied carbon emissions in trade. In addition, it will review and analyze the literatures related to the embodied carbon emissions in international trade in Chinese category. Fifth, it will discuss and compare the advantages and disadvantages of the metering methods in the factors affecting the changes of the embodied carbon emissions. Finally, it will give a general comment of the shortage of the literatures mentioned above and the problems to be resolved in this chapter.Chapter three is on China's external trade and climate change. First. the chapter gives a detailed explanation of the status and the trend of the development of China's international trade and its position in the global market. Then it analyzes the global trade structure of China, the pattern of the imports and exports,terms of trade, the import and export states and regions, main traders, and import and export patterns in China. in particular. With the help of interdependency,contribution, the driving force and other indexes, this chapter gets the chance to probe into the contribution of China's foreign trade to its economy. In addition,this chapter discusses several issues, including China's industry composition structure, the contribution and driving force of three main industries to Chinese economy, the distribution of the fossils and energy resources, and energy consumption since the adoption of the reform and opening-up policy. Finally, from the perspectives of the total emissions of CO2, the emissions structure, the emissions of CO2 per capita and the intensity of the emissions of CO2, it will summarize the global situation, China's situation in particular.Chapter four is the embodied carbon emissions estimation of China's foreign trade. This chapter we adopt input-output model to analyze China's embodied carbon emissions measurement, using the relevant data of the input-output table and China statistical yearbooks of 1997, 2002 and 2007 to analyze china's embodied carbon emissions problem of international trade. First we introduce the basic connotation of embodied carbon and carbon leakage and the basic principles of the input-output model, and then construct the input-output model of the embodied carbon; after that,make a pretreatment explain on the division of industry departments and relevant data. finally, calculate the carbon emissions coefficient of industry department, import and export embodied carbon emissions, net export implied carbon emissions, etc, and the results are discussed and compared.Chapter five analyzes the factors which drive the embodied carbon in the outside-oriented trade. The thesis, by using LMDI, analyzes the factors that influence the emissions of embodied carbon and discusses from three perspectives including scale effect, structure effect and tense effect. By comparing with each other, it also discusses the most influential driving factor which contributes most to the emissions embodied carbon in Chinese import and export trade, and that is the main reason causing the increase of CO2 emissions.Chapter six is on the conclusion and shortages. The thesis, by analyzing the emissions of embodied carbon in international trade in quality and quantity, comes to some primary conclusions. Nowadays all countries in the world are chasing the low-carbon economy, and under this background the thesis puts forward some concrete measures and methods aimed at the development of low-carbon trade in China. At last, the thesis shows some shortages during the research and the research directions in the future.The innovation of this paper is as follows:First, in the studies of the embodied carbon emissions in international trade,the researchers usually choose fossil energies of coal, crude oil and natural gas which are largely consumed as the estimation of CO2 emissions,for CO2 emissions mainly comes from fossil energy consumption. But they have not considered other fuel consumption, so that the results are not perfect and precise. As for China,completing this framework is particularly important. And the reason is that at present China is in the period of rapid urbanization and industrialization, export products consume coking coal, gasoline, kerosene, diesel oil, fuel oil and so on,besides the above three kinds of fossil energy consumption, which also produce a large amount of CO2. Therefore, this article chooses the eight kinds of fuel and calculates the corresponding CO2 emissions coefficient, and then solves the corresponding carbon emissions coefficients of industry departments completely and directly.Second, at present , people usually use a single area input-output table to calculate carbon emissions embodied in international trade and calculate embodied carbon emissions in imported products under technology homogeneous hypothesis.Under this hypothesis, if the host country and exporter have similar technology,the results of the empirical analysis are almost the same. However, if their technologies are largely different, the results will be quite different. In fact, it is easy to find that China is net embodied carbon exporter in empirical analysis of most existing related literature while other literature gets the idea that China is net importer of embodied carbon. The root cause of this kind of result is that different scholars use different technology coefficient when calculating the embodied carbon emissions in Chinese imported products. This article, leaving aside technical homogeneity assumption, can get the complete carbon emissions coefficient corresponding to China's export industry sectors by using our country's data and input-output model to strike, while the complete carbon emissions coefficient of each industry sectors of import-origin countries or regions, can be calculated by using the weighted average method and the input-output model and the volume of trade and carbon emissions intensity of six countries that are larger in Chinese imports and other countries. On this basis, embodied carbon emissions corresponding to industries' sectors of the export and import trade can be obtained and more accurately, and then we can know whether China is a net-exported and embodied carbon emissions country.Third, there are a large number of domestic and foreign scholars use LMDI model to study the CO2 emissions, and they mainly focus on national, regional,industrial and other carbon emissions, then discuss and analyze the driving factors and degrees of carbon emissions in the industry or country. But there are rarely researches involved using embodied carbon emissions of international trade as the research object, neither have they explored the major driving factors and the degrees of the implied carbon emissions in import and export trade. This paper will adopt LMDI decomposition method to analyze China's embodied carbon emissions of foreign trade, and divides the driving factors into scale effect, structure effect and intensity effect, in order to obtain the influence degree of the driving factors on the embodied carbon emissions change, and find out the main influence factors. |
PDF Full Text Request