Who should bear the cost of China’s carbon emissions embodied in goods for exports?

Can information and communication technology reduce CO2 emission? A quantile regression analysis

By employing China's provincial panel data covering period 2001-2016, the present study empirically investigates the impact of ICT on CO₂ emission intensity. Specifically, this paper utilizes Internet penetration and mobile phone penetration as proxies to measure ICT respectively and employs quantile regression method to estimate the benchmark model at five quantiles (0.1, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, and 0.9). It is demonstrated that Internet penetration at the national level has a significant negative effect on the CO₂ emission intensity for all quantiles. In addition, Internet penetration has a significant negative effect on CO₂ emission intensity at all quantiles except for 0.1 quantile for China's eastern provinces and has a significant negative effect on CO₂ emission intensity at all quantiles for China's central provinces, whereas Internet penetration has no significant negative impact on CO₂ emission intensity at all quantiles for China's western provinces. By comparison, the reduction effect of Internet penetration on CO₂ emission intensity in China's eastern and central provinces is more obvious and in contrast with the reduction effect of Internet penetration on CO₂ emission intensity in China's eastern provinces, it is greater in China's central provinces. Finally, the impact of mobile phone penetration on CO₂ emission intensity is generally consistent with the impact of Internet penetration. This study provides further evidence that developing countries can simultaneously achieve economic development and reduce carbon emissions through ICT.

Measurement of Low Carbon Economy Efficiency with a Three-Stage Data Envelopment Analysis: A Comparison of the Largest Twenty CO₂ Emitting Countries

This paper employs a three-stage approach to estimate low carbon economy efficiency in the largest twenty CO₂ emitting countries from 2000 to 2012. The approach includes the following three stages: (1) use of a data envelopment analysis (DEA) model with undesirable output to estimate the low carbon economy efficiency and calculate the input and output slacks; (2) use of a stochastic frontier approach to eliminate the impacts of external environment variables on these slacks; (3) re-estimation of the efficiency with adjusted inputs and outputs to reflect the capacity of the government to develop a low carbon economy. The results indicate that the low carbon economy efficiency performances in these countries had worsened during the studied period. The performances in the third stage are larger than that in the first stage. Moreover, in general, low carbon economy efficiency in Annex I countries of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is better than that in Non-Annex I countries. However, the gap of the average efficiency score between Annex I and Non-Annex I countries in the first stage is smaller than that in the third stage. It implies that the external environment variables show greater influence on Non-Annex I countries than that on Annex I countries. These external environment variables should be taken into account in the transnational negotiation of the responsibility of promoting CO₂ reductions. Most importantly, the developed countries (mostly in Annex I) should help the developing countries (mostly in Non-Annex I) to reduce carbon emission by opening or expanding the trade, such as encouraging the import and export of the energy-saving and sharing emission reduction technology.