Research On The Embodied Carbon In International Trade

Since the Chinese economic reform, Chinese economy is increasing rapidly, especially after China entering WTO, the scale of China’s import and export trade is continually expanding, which has grown from509.8billion U.S. dollars in2001to nearly3trillion U.S. dollars in2010, with a share of GDP reaching49.17%. As a major economic province of China, Shandong province’s GDP totaled3.916992trillion Yuan in2010, second only to Jiangsu province, which has made a great contribution to our country economic growth. However, Shandong province is in face of more and more serious resource-environmental pressure when using foreign trade to promote economic development because the traditional high investment, high energy resources consumption, high pollution and low value-added industries occupy a large proportion in the industrial economy in the province. What’s worse, all these problems have become the bottleneck of restricting sustainable development of the economy and environment in Shandong province.With the increasing severity of global warming, the emission reduction of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas is considered as an effective way to mitigate the trend of climate change, which has become the hot spots discussed around the world. The influence that international trade and economic growth have on carbon emissions can be seen as a special case of economic development and environmental protection issues to analyze, which is a kind of derivative research subject under the situation where many countries advocate greenhouse gas emissions because of global warming. As an energy intensive sector, the industrial sector’s energy consumption accounts for about40%of global energy use, which is the main department of carbon emissions. However, the amount of energy consumption and carbon emissions in Shandong province will continue to grow with the further advance of the level of economic integration and industrialization. As a result of this, Shandong province has faced with dual pressure of resources and the environment. Therefore, according to the present economic development situation in Shandong province, the analysis of foreign trade and implicit carbon emissions will provide theoretical basis and practical guidance for the future energy strategy and carbon dioxide emission reduction strategy of Shandong province, which also can effectively improve the ecological environment in Shandong province for the purpose of achieving the goal of reducing the pressure on resources and environment.This paper is based on embodied carbon emissions in international trade by using modified input-output model to measure the embodied carbon emissions in the import and export trade of industrial departments, which can objectively measure the part of foreign transfer emissions among Shandong province’s industrial foreign trade. And then exploring the net effect that foreign trade has on environment by calculating time change trend of environmental costs in Shandong province, which will help to deeply realize the inner mechanism of free trade and environment. The study found that trade liberalization has negative effects on Shandong province’s ecological environment, and the embodied carbon emissions of net exports over the years are all positive, which has shown increasing trend year by year. Each industrial department’s carbon emissions coefficient and related volume of trade co-determine the embedded carbon emissions in foreign trade. And the foreign trade scale is the major cause of implied carbon emissions growth, but the high carbon coefficient of some departments itself also can’t be ignored. Accordingly, this paper puts forward some feasible policy recommendations to promote the balanced and sustainable development between foreign trade and environment in Shandong province.