Hostname: page-component-76d6cb85b7-92wsb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-07-23T05:34:27.799Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Beyond the nation-state narrative: an empirical inquiry into the cross-country and cross-income-group carbon consumption patterns

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2021

Ying Chen Open the ORCID record for Ying Chen [Opens in a new window]  and
Güney Işıkara
Ying Chen*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, The New School University, New York, NY, USA
Güney Işıkara
Affiliation:
Department of Liberal Studies, New York University, New York, NY, USA
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: yingc@newschool.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The concern for inequality, growth and development is undoubtedly crucial in the context of climate change mitigation and adaptation. However, most studies either rely on the nation-state estimates of carbon emissions to propose a uniform nation-wide growth (or degrowth) strategy, or they tailor the method to assess the inequality of one country at a time, making a cross-country cross-income comparison difficult. To fill this analytical gap, we synthesize the existing methods of emission calculations and calculate the level of carbon emissions associated with given income deciles of household consumption in five countries, namely China, Germany, India, the UK and USA. We find that the within-country inequality varies among countries, with the ratio between the top and bottom income deciles ranging from three to nine at the household level. We also find that the carbon emissions of the top income group in urban China is almost comparable to that of their peer group in the US, UK and Germany. Based on these results, we discuss the use of the remaining global carbon budget in the context of development and inequality.

Keywords

degrowthenvironmental justiceglobal warminggrowthinequalitymitigation

JEL classification

Q54: Climate • Natural Disasters and Their Management • Global Warming Q56: Environment and Development • Environment and Trade • Sustainability • Environmental Accounts and Accounting • Environmental Equity • Population Growth F64: Environment

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Environment and Development Economics , Volume 27 , Issue 1 , February 2022 , pp. 67 - 85
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

The online version of this article has been updated since original publication. A notice detailing the changes has also been published at: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355770X21000164

†

The names of the authors, with equal contribution to the completion of the project, are listed alphabetically.

References

Anand, I and Thampi, A (2016) Recent trends in wealth inequality in India. Economic & Political Weekly 51, 59–67.Google Scholar
Azad, R and Chakraborty, S (2020) Green growth and the right to energy in India. Energy Policy 141, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2020.111456.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boyce, JK and Riddle, M (2007) Cap and dividend: how to curb global warming while protecting the incomes of American families. Political Economy Research Institute Working Paper Series 150, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA.Google Scholar
Clarke-Sather, A, Qu, J, Wang, Q, Zeng, J and Li, Y (2011) Carbon inequality at the sub-national scale: a case study of provincial-level inequality in CO2 emissions in China 1997–2007. Energy Policy 39, 5420–5428.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Energy Information Administration (EIA) (2018) Energy and the environment explained: where greenhouse gases come from. Available at .Google Scholar
Energy Information Administration (EIA) (2019) Monthly Energy Review: April 2019. Available at https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/archive/00351904.pdf.Google Scholar
Foster, JB, Clark, B and York, R (2011) The Ecological Rift: Capitalism's War on the Earth. New York: Monthly Review Press.Google Scholar
Fremstad, A and Paul, M (2019) The impact of a carbon tax on inequality. Ecological Economics 163, 88–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fremstad, A, Underwood, A and Zahran, S (2018) The environmental impact of sharing: household and urban economies in CO2 emissions. Ecological Economics 145, 137–147.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Friedlingstein, P, Jones, MW, O'Sullivan, M, Andrew, RM, Hauck, J, Peters, GP, Peters, W, Pongratz, J, Sitch, S, Le Quéré, C, Bakker, DCE, Canadell, JG, Ciais, P, Jackson, RB, Anthoni, P, Barbero, L, Bastos, A, Bastrikov, V, Becker, M, Bopp, L, Buitenhuis, E, Chandra, N, Chevallier, F, Chini, LP, Currie, KI, Feely, RA, Gehlen, M, Gilfillan, D, Gkritzalis, T, Goll, DS, Gruber, N, Gutekunst, S, Harris, I, Haverd, V, Houghton, RA, Hurtt, G, Ilyina, T, Jain, AK, Joetzjer, E, Kaplan, JO, Kato, E, Klein Goldewijk, K, Korsbakken, JI, Landschützer, P, Lauvset, SK, Lefèvre, N, Lenton, A, Lienert, S, Lombardozzi, D, Marland, G, McGuire, PC, Melton, JR, Metzl, N, Munro, DR, Nabel, JEMS, Nakaoka, S-I, Neill, C, Omar, AM, Ono, T, Peregon, A, Pierrot, D, Poulter, B, Rehder, G, Resplandy, L, Robertson, E, Rödenbeck, C, Séférian, R, Schwinger, J, Smith, N, Tans, PP, Tian, H, Tilbrook, B, Tubiello, FN, van der Werf, GR, Wiltshire, AJ and Zaehle, S (2019) Global Carbon Budget 2019. Earth System Science Data 11, 1783–1838. Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/essd-11-1783-2019.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ge, M, Friedrich, J and Damassa, T (2014) 6 graphs to explain the world's top 10 emitters. World Resources Institute. Available at https://www.wri.org/blog/2014/11/6-graphs-explain-world-s-top-10-emitters.Google Scholar
Gore, T (2015) Extreme carbon inequality: Why the Paris climate deal must put the poorest, lowest emitting and most vulnerable people first. Oxfam Media Briefing. Available at .Google Scholar
Hubacek, K, Baiocchi, G, Feng, K, Castillo, RM, Sun, L and Xue, J (2017) Global carbon inequality. Energy, Ecology, Environment 2, 361–369.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
IPCC (2018). Global Warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC Special Report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty. World Meteorological Organization, Geneva, Switzerland. Available at https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/.Google Scholar
Jorgenson, AK, Schor, JB, Knight, KW and Huang, X (2016) Domestic inequality and carbon emissions in comparative perspective. Sociological Forum 31, 770–786.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jorgenson, AK, Schor, JB and Huang, X (2017) Income inequality and carbon emissions in the United States: a state-level analysis, 1997–2012. Ecological Economics 134, 40–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mathur, A and Morris, A (2014) Distributional effects of a carbon tax in broader U.S. fiscal reform. Energy Policy 66, 326–334.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Matthews, HD (2016) Quantifying historical carbon and climate debts among nations. Nature Climate Change 6, 60–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Michael, K and Vakulabharanam, V (2016) Class and climate change in post-reform India. Climate and Development 8, 224–233.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oswald, Y, Owen, A and Steinberger, JK (2020) Large inequality in international and intranational energy footprints between income groups and across consumption categories. Nature Energy 5, 231–239.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pargal, S and Banerjee, SG (2014) More Power to India: The Challenge of Electricity Distribution. Washington, DC: The World Bank. Available at https://www.esmap.org/node/4488.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peters, GP and Hertwich, EG (2008) Post-Kyoto greenhouse gas inventories: production versus consumption. Climatic Change 86, 51–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Piketty, T and Saez, E (2014) Inequality in the long run. Science (New York, N.Y.) 344, 838–843.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pollin, R (2019) Advancing a viable global climate stabilization project: degrowth versus the Green New Deal. Review of Radical Political Economics 51, 311–319.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ritchie, H and Roser, M (2019) Access to energy. Our World in Data. Available at https://ourworldindata.org/energy-access.Google Scholar
Sulemana, I, Nketiah-Amponsah, E, Codjoe, EA and Andoh, JAN (2019) Urbanization and income inequality in Sub-saharan Africa. Sustainable Cities and Society 48, 101544.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Symons, EJ, Speck, S and Proops, JLR (2002) The distributional effects of carbon and energy taxes: the cases of France, Spain, Italy, Germany and UK. Environmental Policy and Governance 12, 203–212.Google Scholar
Wiedenhofer, D, Guan, D, Liu, Z, Meng, J, Zhang, N and Wei, Y (2017) Unequal household carbon footprints in China. Nature Climate Change 7, 75–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wiedmann, T (2009) A review of recent multi-region input-output models used for consumption-based emission and resource accounting. Ecological Economics 69, 211–222.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wu, S, Zheng, X and Wei, C (2017) Measurement of inequality using household energy consumption data in rural China. Nature Energy 2, 795–803.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Xie, Y and Zhou, X (2014) Income inequality in today's China. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, 6928–6933.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Supplementary material: PDF

Chen and Işıkara supplementary material

Chen and Işıkara supplementary material
Download Chen and Işıkara supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 165 KB