Abstract
This study aims to evaluate the environmental and employment impacts of China’s value-added trade using the gross exports decomposition method and balance of avoided factor content. The major findings are that China’s value-added trade overall leads to increases in global emissions and employment, which are mainly affected by the characteristics of China’s exports. However, China’s imports indirectly promote global emissions reductions and have a significant driving effect on foreign employment. Trade through onefold value chains plays a dominant role in determining both impacts. Simple global value chain (GVC)-related trade contributes most to reducing global emissions but decreases global employment as well. Complex GVC-related trade overall increases global employment and emissions. At the bilateral level, the impacts are varied, and there are some instances of complex GVC-related bilateral trade that contribute to global emission mitigation. A win–win situation for the environment and employment can be achieved in China’s bilateral trade with some countries through specific value chain routes. These findings can provide useful information for balancing trade growth, carbon emission reduction, and job creation and may indicate the future direction of China’s upgrade in the GVCs and help allocate emission reduction responsibilities.
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Notes
“China” refers to the mainland of China, and “Taiwan” refers to Taiwan of China, which we call “Taiwan” for short in this paper.
Note that the foreign emissions here refer to the emissions generated in direct trade partners induced by China’s imports, which do not include the emissions generated in the “third party.”.
We assume that the unit of labor input is equal to the creation of a unit job, so labor input and job creation are used in this paper without distinction to measure employment.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Editage for English language editing. We thank anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.
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This research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number: 71873021].
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Shukuan Bai: conceptualization, methodology, data curation, writing—original draft preparation; Yadong Ning: supervision, conceptualization, formal analysis, writing—reviewing and editing; Boya Zhang: visualization, validation, writing—reviewing and editing. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
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Appendices
Appendix A
The appendix presents the equation used to calculate labor content in this study.
The gross labor embodied in region s’s gross exports to region r (LEGsr) can be expressed as:
The domestic labor embodied in the exports from region s to region r (LEXsr) can be expressed as:
The balance of the embodied labor (BELsr) is:
The impacts of value-added trade on the labor inputs of region s (BELs) are:
The labor displaced by the imports of region s from region r (LDMsr) is:
The balance of displaced labor (BDLsr) is:
The impacts of region s’s value-added trade on global employment (BDLs) is:
Appendix B
Tables
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Bai, S., Ning, Y. & Zhang, B. Estimating the environmental and employment impacts of China’s value-added trade from the perspective of value chain routes. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29, 73414–73443 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-20575-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-20575-6