After 40 years of reform and “opening up,” China has made remarkable economic progress. Such economic prosperity, however, has been coupled with environmental degradation. We analyze diverse long-term data to determine whether China is experiencing a decoupling of economic growth and environmental impacts, and where China stands with respect to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in terms of reducing regional division, urban-rural gap, social inequality, and land-based impacts on oceans. The results highlight that China’s desire to achieve “ecological civilization” has resulted in a decoupling trend for major pollutants since 2015, while strong coupling remains with CO2 emissions. Progress has been made in health care provision, poverty reduction, and gender equity in education, while income disparity continues between regions and with rural-urban populations. There is a considerable way to go toward achieving delivery of the SDGs; however, China’s progress toward economic prosperity and concomitant sustainability provides important insights for other countries.
This paper provides a review of the literature on competitiveness and leakage concerns associated with differentiated climate abatement commitments among countries. The literature reviewed is not exhausted, but it is sufficient to provide a balanced view of both academics and policy circles. Section 2 discusses how to indentify the sectors at a risk of carbon leakage. Section 3 examines ex ante estimates of potential carbon leakage rates, and explains why they differ from ex post results of environmental tax reforms and greenhouse gas emissions trading schemes that have been implemented in the European Union. Section 4 discusses broad policy options to address competitiveness and leakage concerns, and compares which anti-leakage policy, border adjustments or output-based allocation, is more effective to limiting carbon leakages or mitigating production loss in the sectors affected. Given that border carbon adjustment measures are incorporated in the U.S. proposed congressional climate bills to level the carbon playing field and could have potential conflicts with World Trade Organization (WTO) provisions and practical difficulties associated with their implementation, Section 5 discuses in great detail the WTO consistency, the effectiveness and methodological challenges of border carbon adjustment measures. The paper ends with some concluding remarks.
A number of studies have compared national carbon abatement responsibility under different carbon accounting schemes. However, the difficulty of the shift among different national carbon accounting schemes has rarely been quantitatively evaluated in the literature. Spatial production fragmentation over the recent decades has led to geographical separation among the primary inputs supplying regions, carbon emitting regions, and final consuming regions. The purpose of this paper is to reveal the effects of spatial production fragmentation on the shift from production-based to consumptionbased and income-based national carbon accounting. Based on both demand-and supply-driven input-output analytical frameworks, this paper analyses the allocation of carbon responsibility for embodied and enabled emissions along production chains over the period 1995-2009. It was found that as much as 25% of embodied emissions and 20% of enabled emissions crossed national borders more than once in 2009. The shift among different carbon accounting schemes is not only related to the magnitude of trade related emissions but also related to border-crossing frequency associated with emissions embodied in or enabled by international trade. The increasingly fragmented production networks complicate the shift from production-based to consumption-based or incomebased accounting and weaken the effectiveness of consumption-based or income-based accounting.
In conclusion, rs520688 in NOTCH4 and rs2030324 in BDNF are significantly associated with schizophrenia among Han Chinese in Southern China. The two had a combined effect on the susceptibility to schizophrenia among Han Chinese in Southern China, but this may not be caused by an allele-allele interaction.
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