Carbon Emissions Abatement Cost in China: Provincial Panel Data Analysis

Abstract

This paper employs the quadratic directional output distance function to derive shadow prices of China's aggregate carbon emissions at the province level between 1997 and 2010. The empirical results indicate that the national weighted average shadow price presents an "N-shape" curve across the sample period, experiencing the initial phase of growth followed by a phase of deterioration, and then a further increase. This change trend implies that the cost of carbon emissions reduction is increasing. In addition, the shadow price varies significantly across provinces, which means that China should uphold the principal of "common but differentiated responsibilities" in regional carbon emissions reduction. Generally, the shadow price of the east provinces with high economic development is markedly higher than that of the west provinces with low economic development. The OLS regression results indicate that the shadow price positively connected with the regional economic development levels. Moreover, an inflection point exists in the relation curve between the shadow price and GDP per capita, that is, the increase rate of the shadow price becomes small when the GDP per capita is less than 18.1 thousand Yuan, while it becomes large when the GDP per capita surpasses 18.1 thousand Yuan. With the economic growth, the cost of carbon emissions reduction would be significantly increased. The empirical results can provide more insight for policymakers.

Evaluation of health resource utilization efficiency in community health centers of Jiangsu Province, China

“…The number of beds was used as proxy for the CHCs’ capital stock (see [ 7 , 14 , 16 ]). On the other hand, the number of outpatient and inpatient cases was treated as outputs variables and were chosen for the 13 cities over an 8-year period for the final analysis [ 16 – 18 ].…”

Industrial Carbon Emissions of China’s Regions: A Spatial Econometric Analysis

“…552-565), Choi et al [14] (pp. 198-208) and Wang et al [7] (pp. 2584-2600) investigated the regional carbon emission efficiency for Chinese Provinces.…”

“…It argues that initially, environmental degradation rises as a country industrializes; as the country develops economically and is able to invest in combating environmental degradation and the economy shifts from industry to services, however, environmental outcomes improve. Prior work using spatial panel data models has shown that China's regional economic development is spatially correlated with environmental quality [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]. By estimating a spatial panel data model with fixed effects, Zhu et al [8] (pp.…”

Knowledge Mapping of Research on the Impact of Industrialization on Carbon Emissions in China: a Bibliometric Analysis Using CiteSpace and VOSviewer

“…Therefore, it is essential to coordinate the relationship between economic development and carbon emissions. Wang et al [47] used the quadratic directional output distance function to derive the shadow price of China's provincial total carbon emissions. They found that China's weighted average shadow price presented an "N-shaped" curve, and the cost of carbon emission reduction would increase significantly with the economic growth.…”