Abstract
Exports contribute significantly to both income creation and pollution generation in China. Using a global input-output model, this paper examines domestic value-added and 8 types of air pollutant emissions generated by export production in China during the period of 1995–2009. The results show that both value-added and emissions created by exports of China increased significantly in the study period. In 2009, the share of value-added exports in Chinese GDP accounted for 32.3%. Meanwhile, emissions embodied in exports accounted 22–35% of total production emissions in China for 8 types of air pollutants. Although pollution intensities of value-added exports (the ratio of emissions to value-added created in the production of exports) in China were continuously declining for all pollutants in the study period, they were much greater than those of other major exporting countries. Based on a structural decomposition analysis, we find that the gaps in pollution intensities of value-added exports between China and other major exporting countries mainly result from differences in direct emissions intensity and input structure of production, whereas differences in export structure generally reduces the gaps in pollution intensities of value-added exports.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
See Wiedmann (2009) for an overviews on earlier studies.
- 3.
- 4.
Note \({\mathbf{e}}_{r}\) do not equal total exports of region r because they don’t include the exported products which are re-imported after processing abroad to satisfy the final demand of region r itself.
- 5.
The database can be accessed at http://www.wiod.org/new_site/data.htm.
- 6.
Some high peaks of PIVE for CO and NMVOC have appeared in some year (1999, 2000, 2006). They are likely caused by outliers in emissions data.
- 7.
We select these 10 countries from two major considerations: first, they are all major exporting countries like China in the world in terms of value-added exports, and second, they have much lower PIVE than China and therefore may offer greater learning and cooperation opportunity for China to further reduce its PIVE in the future.
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Acknowledgements
We acknowledge the funding from China Postdoctoral Science Foundation project (No. 2016M591373). We would like to thank one anonymous referee whose comments and suggestions have greatly improved this paper. We also thank seminar participants for their helpful comments in the 24th International Input-Output Conference (July 2016, Seoul, Korea).
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Zhang, W., Wei, R. (2018). Emissions Cost and Value-Added Benefit of Exports in China: An Analysis Based on a Global Input-Output Model. In: Pang, R., Bai, X., Lovell, K. (eds) Energy, Environment and Transitional Green Growth in China. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7919-1_15
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