Tracing Air Pollutant Emissions in China: Structural Decomposition and GVC Accounting

Abstract

The depth and breadth of China's participation in global value chains have an important impact on the emissions of air pollutants from the production side, consumption side, and trade implications in China's industries. Based on the global value chain accounting framework, this paper examines the path of China's major air pollutant emissions in production and consumption during 1995-2009 and structurally decomposes the factors affecting air pollutant emissions. The results show that, firstly, both the air pollutant emissions on the production side and the air pollution emissions on the consumption side have increased significantly, and the production-side emissions have been higher than the consumption-side emissions. Secondly, the export of intermediate products shows a trend of "high pollution", and this trend was more obvious after China's accession to the world trade organization (WTO). Thirdly, the expansion of economic growth was the most important factor in the rapid emission of air pollutants in China and the reduction of pollution efficiency in Chinese industries depends on the increase in service inputs.

Why Is Pollution from US Manufacturing Declining? The Roles of Environmental Regulation, Productivity, and Trade

“…The finding of the statistical decomposition that composition effects are similarly small both across industries and products provides suggestive evidence that this is not a first-order channel for studying pollution intensity. 26 Our specification of CES preferences implies that we abstract from consumer tastes changing among varieties within a sector.…”

Mapping economic drivers of China's NOx emissions due to energy consumption

“…Structural Decomposition Analysis (SDA), with higher data requirements for the input-output table, performs more advanced and detailed decomposition of the economic structure; thus, it can capture both direct and indirect effects (Hoekstra and Van den Bergh, 2003). For China as a whole, studies have been conducted to understand the driving factors of NOx emissions by SDA, with studied periods lying between 1995 and 2012 (Chen et al, 2019;Liu and Liang, 2017;Xie et al, 2018;Xu et al, 2017;. Three of the studies decompose the total pollutant emissions (including NOx) (Chen et al, 2019;Xie et al, 2018) or the NOx emissions multiplier (Liu and Liang, 2017) other than NOx emissions.…”

“…For China as a whole, studies have been conducted to understand the driving factors of NOx emissions by SDA, with studied periods lying between 1995 and 2012 (Chen et al, 2019;Liu and Liang, 2017;Xie et al, 2018;Xu et al, 2017;. Three of the studies decompose the total pollutant emissions (including NOx) (Chen et al, 2019;Xie et al, 2018) or the NOx emissions multiplier (Liu and Liang, 2017) other than NOx emissions. In general, economic scale effect contributes to the emissions growth (Chen et al, 2019;Xie et al, 2018;Xu et al, 2017;.…”

“…Three of the studies decompose the total pollutant emissions (including NOx) (Chen et al, 2019;Xie et al, 2018) or the NOx emissions multiplier (Liu and Liang, 2017) other than NOx emissions. In general, economic scale effect contributes to the emissions growth (Chen et al, 2019;Xie et al, 2018;Xu et al, 2017;. Factors that inhibited China's NOx emissions previously are mainly related to technical progress, including the end-of-pipe facilities , phasing out of backward capacity , and energy intensity (Xu et al, 2017;Xie et al, 2018).…”