Underlying Factors For Transport Sector CO2Emissions

As one of the largest carbon emitters and largest developing country over the world, China is faced with dual-pressure from producing less environment pollution and gaining higher infrastructure level. Among all the industries in China, transport sector act as a more and more important pillar of regional development when it meets the augmented transporting need incurred by the growth of household income and urbanization. In this means, China’s transport sector is an active and meaningful factor to actualize both economic and environmental development. It is obvious that China has achieved significant progress both in economic development and transportation infrastructure since1990s.The improvement of sector infrastructure and network accessibility enables the growing transporting need to be satisfied, while the problem of energy consumption and pollutions emission it produced are also drawing more and more attentions. According to some researches to foreign countries, the proportion of transport sector in total energy consumption is1/4or more in developed countries like America and Japan, in which road transportation constitutes80%or more. But, take into account that vehicle ownership is still quite low, China lags behind with8-11%. While it is a nonreciprocal trend in China that vehicle ownership will continuously increase with urbanization and household income growing (say,350/thousand people). It is certain that China has big potential both in transporting need and fuel consumption (carbon emissions).Plenty of researches have been proceeded to unfold problem of transport sector, including industrial fuel consumption and emission potential, factors affecting transport sector emissions and policies to carry out. They tell us some basic fact and characteristics about China transport sector. But compared to studies on transportation of foreign countries, two short-comings stand out in research of carbon emissions of China transport sector: on one hand, most studies concentrate on road transportation or passenger/freight transportation and emissions from whole industry has been largely ignored. On the other hand, methods adapted in investigating China transport sector are all non-econometric and we believe that econometric technique may help us to better understand China transportation emission if this method is employed appropriately. These make it a necessity to do further research.The STIRPAT model, which is used to study the driving factors to environmental pressure, has been employed in this paper to enfold factors affecting carbon emissions in China transport sector. Five explanatory variables, including passenger turnover, freight turnover, domestic market potential, fuel modal index and sectorial energy intensity, have been imported as substitutes of driving factors, A (Affluence), P (Population) and T (Technique), in STIRPAT model. We get an better understand of main source of carbon emission in China transport sector by analyzing relationship between passenger/freight transport and emissions growth, catch the existence of inter-influence from economic development among different provinces by importing MPD index, comment the fuel consumption efficiency policy and analyze policies beyond it by investigating fuel consumption efficiency and fuel modal in China transport sector. In fact, to ensure the robustness of our conclusions and expand our findings, our estimations are preceded both in national panel and in3regional-panels after absolute-and conditional-convergence analysis to detect regional heterogeneity on sectorial carbon emissions have been carried out. And our basic modal has been estimated both in short-run static and long-run dynamic analysis.According to this paper, we find some interesting phenomena: firstly, passenger transport is more critical factor in China transport sector emission-reduction, compared to freight transport. Secondly, an inverse-U distribution exists among China’s three regions (from the eastern to the western) in term of influence from passenger transport to sectorial carbon emissions. Thirdly, the existence of spill-over effect from transport sector verifies inter-influence from economic development among different provinces. Fourth, fuel modal shift has enormous potential in emission-reduction in China transport sector. What’s more, energy efficiency improvement is effective but limited in reducing emissions.