Assessing the Drivers of China’s CO₂ Emissions Based on PDA

ABSTRACT

To explore which factors affect changes in carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions in China, based on production decomposition analysis (PDA), and data envelope analysis (DEA), this paper decomposes these changes into nine indicators. Then we measure the effects of these factors and analyze the effects at three levels: the nation, the main regions, and individual provinces. The results are as follows. First, since 2012 aggregate CO₂ emissions in China have decreased, indicating the success of government efforts. Second, the effects of various factors on CO₂ emissions in the eastern, central, and western regions differ significantly, emissions in the western region are high, and the eastern and central regions have the potential reduce their emissions. Third, the dominant contributors to CO₂ emissions are economic growth, the structure of energy consumption, carbon emissions technology, and energy consumption efficiency, whereas the other factors are conducive to reductions in CO₂ emissions. Based on our research results, we make some policy recommendations on reducing CO₂ emissions in China to promote the coordinated and sustainable development of the economy and the environment.

KEY WORDS:

• CO₂ emissions
• production decomposition analysis
• Shephard distance function

Acknowledgments

This paper was supported by the Shandong Provincial Natural Science Foundation, China (no. ZR2016GQ06), the Ministry of Education of Humanities and Social Science project (no. 16YJAZH054), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (no. 17CX04017B).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by authors.

Notes

1. The exchange rate in 1978 was 1.72, and was 6.5 in 2017.

2. The derivation of Equation (11)(11) $\begin{array}{rl}CH=& {\left(PCFC{H}^0\times PCFC{H}^T\right)}^{\frac{1}{2}}\times {\left(PEIC{H}^0\times PEIC{H}^T\right)}^{\frac{1}{2}}\\ & \times {\left(GDPC{H}^0\times GDPC{H}^T\right)}^{\frac{1}{2}}\times {\left(CEEC{H}^0\times CEEC{H}^T\right)}^{\frac{1}{2}}\\ & \times {\left(ECEC{H}^0\times ECEC{H}^T\right)}^{\frac{1}{2}}\times {\left(GDPEC{H}^0\times GDPEC{H}^T\right)}^{\frac{1}{2}}\\ =& PCFCH\times PEICH\times GDPCH\times CEECH\times ECECH\times GDPECH\end{array}$(11) is shown in Appendix A.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [17CX04017B];Shandong Provincial Natural Science Foundation of P.R. China[ZR2016GQ06];