Estimate Of China’s CO₂Emissions Embodied In Exports And Study On The Influences

China’s exploding exports lead to a concomitant gargantuan amount of CO₂emissions,that is, CO₂emissions embodied in exports that are incurred in support of importers’consumption. This thesis is an attempt to evaluate China’s CO₂emissions embodied inexports and the influences on the changes in them, therefore revealing the engines thathave driven the increase in China’s CO₂emissions embodied in exports. The Chinesegovernment might also refer to the empirical results of this thesis to take measures onenergy saving and emission reduction, as well as on adjustment of export composition andtransition of growth mode.First of all, this thesis established a revised Single-Region Input-Output （SRIO）model that distinguishes between domestically produced and imported intermediate inputs.Applying OECD’s China input-output table and energy consumption data that covers allkinds of energy used by China’s industry sectors, this thesis estimated China’s CO₂emissions embodied in commodity and service exports and sectoral distribution of the CO₂emissions in a relatively long time span from1995to2009. The results led to therevelation that the estimation period witnessed a leap in both China’s CO₂emissionsembodied in exports and their proportion of China’s total emissions. China’s CO₂emissions embodied in exports in1995were845million tonnes, accounting for28.31%ofChina’s total CO₂emissions that year. In2008, the number rocketed to4039million tonnes,which was62.07%of the total. Global financial crisis in2009, however, brought it downto3175million tonnes and saw its percentage of the total slump to46.48%. It followedthat China, in the benefit of importers, emitted huge volume of CO₂, and abatement of theuntamed increase in CO₂emissions embodied in exports is one of the keys for China toaccomplishing the goal pertaining to CO₂emission reduction. On the basis of the aboveestimates, this thesis followed Grossman&Krueger’s analysis framework ofenvironmental impact of trade and constructed a Structural Decomposition Analysis （SDA）model to break down the influences on the changes in China’s CO₂emissions embodied inexports into technique effect, composition effect and scale effect, at both overall andindustrial level. The results exhibited the primary role played by rapid expansion ofChina’s export scale contributing to the increase in China’s CO₂emissions embodied inexports. Although both advancement of technique and fluctuation of export compositionled to respectively large and small abatement of the increase, the overall abatement was far outrun by the enlargement exerted via export scale. The empirical results related both tothe scale of China’s CO₂emissions embodied in exports and to influences on the increasein these emissions, at the end of this thesis, gave rise to pertinent policy recommendationsaimed at curbing the increase in China’s CO₂emissions embodied in exports.