A Trade Structure Research With The Analysis Of Carbon Emissions Embodied In China's Foreign Trade

With the prosperity and development of the world economy, human energy demand has been increasingly strong, along with plunderage and destruction of natural resource. To satisfying every country's need of economic development in the world, large amounts of fossil energy are consumed. In the process of the combustion of fossil energy, massive CO2 are emitted, which is the main greenhouse gas that contribute to global warming, as a result CO2 emissions mitigation has become the focus of the world. With the deepening of international division of labor, integration of world economy accelerates gradually, and a country's economy can connect with other countries through foreign trade. According to statistics, as a major trading nation and export-led economy, China's imports and exports in 2010 totaled $2.9728 trillion. Such a large scale of foreign trade would surely cause massive emissions from the manufacture of trade commodities. However, emissions embodied in export commodities are allocated to exporter, while consumer countries are not responsible for that. This means that exporter produces commodities to meet importer's consumer demand at the cost of environment and CO2 emissions, which brought tremendous pressure on exporter's environment and make it be at disadvantage in the problem of energy conservation and emission reduction. When China faces this situation, firstly we should know how much CO2 emissions are embodied in China's foreign trade, secondly analyse if trade structure is reasonable in terms of CO2 emissions. In this paper the Input–Output model was applied to calculate the total intensity and amount of CO2 emission for each economic sector, then we investigated what factors contribute to emissions'changes, and combined the analysis of trade structure, so that we could research the problem of foreign trade and CO2 emissions in depth. The empirical analysis results showed that total intensity of CO2 emission for each economic sector which declined from 1997 to 2007 were still relatively high. From 1997 to 2002, 2002 to 2007, CO2 emissions embodied in export and import increased continually. We also found that in 2002 China's net CO2 emissions embodied in trade was negative, which meant that the amount of CO2 emissions of China increased because of export that year is less than that saved via import, so foreign trade generally benefited China's energy conservation and emission reduction. Technology effect helped reduce CO2 emissions from 1997 to 2002, the same as 1992 to 2005. But composition effect worked in different ways during the two periods. The expansion of trade scale was the important reason of the increase of CO2 emissions embodied in trade. After combining total intensity of CO2 emission for each economic sector, we found that China mainly exported commodities whose intensities of CO2 emission were low, while imported commodities whose intensities of CO2 emission were high. At the end of this paper, we proposed political suggestions based on empirical analysis results above.