Input-output analysis of embodied emissions: Impacts of imports data treatment on emission drivers

Bin Su, B.W. Ang () and Ya-Fang Sun

Energy Economics, 2022, vol. 107, issue C

Abstract: Input-output (I-O) analysis has been widely used in embodied emission studies. For country-level analysis, the non-competitive imports assumption is generally preferred. However, national I-O tables with the non-competitive imports assumption are often not available. In empirical studies, the uniform imports share approach is usually adopted to give the estimated tables from the I-O tables with the competitive imports assumption. When data are available for two different years, structural decomposition analysis (SDA) can be applied to study the drivers of the embodied emission changes. We propose a SDA framework with two imports effects, i.e. input imports effect and demand imports effect, to evaluate the impacts of imports data treatment on the drivers. An empirical study using China's latest I-O datasets, for 2017 and 2018, show that the impacts are not significant at the national level but are significant at the sectoral level. For the latter, the impacts on sectoral embodied emission intensity range from −5% to 16%, while on sectoral embodied emissions range from −8% to 35%. Sectoral aggregate embodied intensity (AEI) indicators are found to be more robust to the imports data treatments than sectoral embodied emission intensity. In some cases a change in the sign of the input imports effect or demand imports effect is observed, which leads to opposite outcomes. Implications of the findings on embodied emission studies and the role of imports are discussed.

Keywords: Input-output analysis; Structural decomposition analysis; Embodied emissions; Input imports effect; Demand imports effect; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C67 P28 Q43 Q54 Q56 R15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140988322000585
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:eneeco:v:107:y:2022:i:c:s0140988322000585

DOI: 10.1016/j.eneco.2022.105875

Access Statistics for this article

Energy Economics is currently edited by R. S. J. Tol, Beng Ang, Lance Bachmeier, Perry Sadorsky, Ugur Soytas and J. P. Weyant

More articles in Energy Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().