China's Carbon Emissions 1971-2003

Although the conclusion that coal and carbon emissions are linked this paper provides an interesting decomposition methodology. My interest comes primarily from the suggestion that Chinese statistics have been overstated or are inaccurate and would explain a number of results in some current work I am involved in.

China's Carbon Emissions 1971-2003
Date: 2007-06
By: Chunbo Ma (Department of Economics, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY 12180-3590, USA)
David I. Stern (Department of Economics, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY 12180-3590, USA)

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:rpi:rpiwpe:0706&r=env [PDF hence not live link]

A number of previous studies on China's carbon emissions have mainly focused on two facts: 1) the continuous growth in emissions up till the middle of the 1990s; 2) the recent stability of emissions from 1996 to 2001. Decomposition analysis has been widely used to explore the driving forces behind these phenomena. However, since 2002, China's carbon emissions have resumed their growth at an even greater rate. This paper investigates China's carbon emissions during 1971-2003, with particular focus on the role of biomass, and, the fall and resurgence in emissions since the mid-1990s. We use an extended Kaya identity and the well-established logarithmic mean Divisia index (LMDI I) method. Carbon emissions are decomposed into effects of various driving forces. We find that: (1) A shift from biomass to commercial energy increases carbon emissions by a magnitude comparable to that of the increase in emissions due to population growth; (2) The technological effect and scale effect due to per capita GDP growth are different in the pre-reform period versus the post-reform period; (3) The positive effect of population growth has been decreasing over the entire period; (4) The fall in emissions in the late 1990s and resurgence in the early 2000s may be overstated due to inaccurate statistics. The rapid growth since the early 2000s, therefore, may not indicate a "new trend"; (5) Carbon emissions exhibit a correlation of 0.99 with coal consumption, which points to explicit policy suggestions.
JEL: Q43 Q25