Impact of Influencing Factors on CO 2 Emissions in the Yangtze River Delta during Urbanization

Yixi Xue, Jie Ren and Xiaohang Bi
Additional contact information
Yixi Xue: Management School, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, China
Jie Ren: Management School, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, China
Xiaohang Bi: Department of Economy Strategy, Shanghai Development Strategy Research Institute, Shanghai 200032, China

Sustainability, 2019, vol. 11, issue 15, 1-19

Abstract: The Yangtze River Delta (YRD) is China’s largest urban agglomeration with a rapid urbanization process. This paper analyzes the dynamic relationship between urbanization rate, energy intensity, GDP per capita, and population with CO 2 emissions in YRD over 1990–2011 based on the extended STIRPAT model, impulse response function, and variance decomposition. A support vector machine model was constructed to further predict the scenarios of YRD’s CO 2 emissions from 2015–2020. The results show that YRD’s CO 2 emissions continuously increased during the sample period and are predicted to increase over 2015–2020. Energy intensity is the most influential factor, both in the short and long term, and the total population contributes the least. However, the influencing magnitude of energy intensity tends to decrease in the long term. The increase of urbanization rate is still accompanied by the increase of CO 2 emissions in YRD, but an inverted-U shape relationship between them may exist in the long term. The contribution of GDP per capita to CO 2 emissions is higher than the population and urbanization rate, and its contribution rate for CO 2 emissions is growing. The Kuznets curve does not exist in the current YRD.

Keywords: Yangtze River Delta; STIRPAT model; urbanization; CO 2 emissions; influencing factors (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/15/4183/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/15/4183/ (text/html)

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:gam:jsusta:v:11:y:2019:i:15:p:4183-:d:254292

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().