Abstract
Evidence suggests that climate change is real and accelerating. This has led to a great deal of research on improving energy efficiency and reducing per capita energy consumption, as well as on the sources of air polluting emissions such as carbon, and possible policy options for limiting permanent environmental damage. The top regions in the world in terms of these carbon emissions are China, the United States, the European Union, India, Russia, and Japan. This chapter uses the World Input-Output Database (WIOD) and structural decomposition analysis to determine for these six countries and regions whether observed improvements in energy intensity and carbon dioxide emissions are due to the adoption of new energy technology or changes in trade relationships, final demand structures, or other structural economic changes.
Keywords
- Global climate change
- Mega-regional carbon emissions
- Energy and the environment
- Structural decomposition analysis
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Notes
- 1.
Please refer to Genty et al. (2012) for a detailed explanation of the environmental accounts in the WIOD.
- 2.
The reason the electricity value (2095%) is so out of line with all of the other values may be that “The Liberal Democratic Party, which governed Japan almost continuously from 1955 to 2009 and returned to power in December, wasn’t proactive in cleaning up the country’s air and water.” https://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/15/japans-pollution-diet/ (last accessed on 5/6/2019).
- 3.
http://statisticstimes.com/economy/gross-world-product.php (last accessed on 4/25/2019).
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de Araújo, I.F., Bowen, W.M., Jackson, R., Ferreira Neto, A.B. (2020). Proximate Causes of Worldwide Mega-Regional CO2 Emission Changes, 1995–2009. In: Chen, Z., Bowen, W.M., Whittington, D. (eds) Development Studies in Regional Science. New Frontiers in Regional Science: Asian Perspectives, vol 42. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1435-7_11
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