Blog post based on an article in the journal Environment and Development Economics

In recent years, the surge in China’s CO2 emissions has caused increasing international concern. Since 2007, China has become the largest CO2 emitter in the world. As of 2013, China emitted approximately 1/4 of global CO2 emissions.

In the paper entitled ‘When does the turning point in China’s CO2 emissions occur? Results based on the Green Solow model’ published on the journal Environment and Development Economics at Cambridge in December 2016, the authors investigate whether and when the turning point in China’s CO2 emissions would occur. Given the fact that currently China contributes most CO2 emissions worldwide, the turning point of China’s CO2 emissions is of great importance to the global coordinated effects of mitigating climate change. In the paper, a simple yet powerful neoclassical Green Solow model (GSM) is utilized as the main forecasting tool. GSM was first developed by Brock and Taylor (2010) to explain some stylized facts of pollutant emissions and economic development in the developed countries. To verify the capability of this framework to address China’s economy, a key prediction of the GSM – the convergence in per capita CO2 emissions across Chinese provinces – is empirically verified. By assigning reasonable values to the GSM’s key parameters, the trajectories of total CO2 emissions are projected for the three regions (East, Central and West) of China and the whole country. The forecast results show that, under the benchmark scenario, in which the economic development style and government regulations on CO2 emissions are the same as they were between the sample period of 1995 and 2011, China’s total CO2 emissions would not peak until the year 2047. According to the sensitivity analysis, carbon efficiency is the most important determining factor for whether a turning point in total CO2 emissions may occur. As a result, it is a challenging task for the Chinese government to make China’s CO2 emissions to peak before 2030 as it vowed in November 2014 during the APEC summit. Based on the analysis of this study, a possible police mix is to extensively enhance carbon efficiency and reasonably control population growth. Besides, the slowdown of China’s economy would objectively be helpful to curb China’s CO2 emissions.

Read the full article ‘When does the turning point in China’s CO2 emissions occur? Results based on the Green Solow model’ here

References:

Brock, W. A. and M. S. Taylor (2010), ‘The Green Solow model’, Journal of Economic Growth 15(2): 127–153.