Calculating China's Consumption-based Carbon Emission And Analyzing Influence Factors:An Input-output Framework

There are three main obstacles in developing low-carbon economy and achieving green economic growth in China,although the Chinese government claims to be capable and determined to realize the economic growth under energy saving and emission reduction.Firstly,how to balance the cost of energy saving and emission reduction and economic growth is an unavoidable topic when China's economic growth is no longer as fast as it used to be.Secondly,with the Paris agreement come into force,global environmental and climate work in 2020-2030 has been comprehensively arranged and legally binding,indicating China shall not be the same as in Kyoto protocol(no responsibility for compulsory emission reduction).Thirdly,the implementation of climate related work of the Chinese government is not satisfactory.So,it is of great significance both in practice and theory to assess China's real carbon emission level in the context of entering compulsory emission reduction,meanwhile provide reference for the actual work of emission reduction.Our study is carried out in a two stages framework.First,we calculate the consumption based carbon emission in China implying an input and output model and compare the differences between two accounting method(the consumption based and traditional production based).Then we analyze the carbon flow among China and the main countries or regions in the world in order to further understand the background of global carbon flow.After that we have checked the main factors that affect China's carbon emission based on structural decomposition analysis.In the second stage,we further examine and confirm the influencing effect under the econometric framework by constructing a vector autoregressive model for carbon emission,economic growth,carbon intensity and export to analyze the relationship and dynamic characterisrtics among them.The main conclusion from empirical analysis are:(1)There exists a gap in carbon emission between production based method and consumption based method,meaning that production based method has overestimated China's real carbon emission.The gap was expanding from 2005 to 2011,but it began to shrink after 2011.(2)China is the largest 'consumption based carbon emission inflow country in the world,i.e.the destination country of carbon transfer.(3)Structural decomposition analysis shows impact of final demand on carbon emission is the most important factor in carbon emission growth;carbon emission intensity has a negative impact on carbon emission,which is the most important factor in carbon emission reduction;and the impact of production structure on carbon emission is positive,but the contribution is relatively small.(4)By constructing VAR model among carbon emission,GDP,carbon intensity and export,we confirm the contribution of the output effect to carbon emission,and find that the effects of carbon intensity and export on carbon emission are conducted by GDP.What is more,we there is a negative correlation between carbon emission and GDP in long term,which means that China's low carbon economy has shown the possibility in the long run.