CO2 emissions and economic activity: Short- and long-run economic determinants of scale, energy intensity and carbon intensity

Fredrik Andersson and Peter Karpestam

Energy Policy, 2013, vol. 61, issue C, 1285-1294

Abstract: We analyze the short-term and the long-term determinants of energy intensity, carbon intensity and scale effects for eight developed economies and two emerging economies from 1973 to 2007. Our results show that there is a difference between the short-term and the long-term results and that climate policy are more likely to affect emission over the long-term than over the short-term. Climate policies should therefore be aimed at a time horizon of at least 8 years and year-on-year changes in emissions contains little information about the trend path of emissions. In the long-run capital accumulation is the main driver of emissions. Productivity growth reduces the energy intensity while the real oil price reduces both the energy intensity and the carbon intensity. The real oil price effect suggests that a global carbon tax is an important policy tool to reduce emissions, but our results also suggest that a carbon tax is likely to be insufficient decouple emission from economic growth. Such a decoupling is likely to require a structural transformation of the economy. The key policy challenge is thus to build new economic structures where investments in green technologies are more profitable.

Keywords: Economic growth; CO2 emissions; Short and long run (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (45)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421513004813
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:enepol:v:61:y:2013:i:c:p:1285-1294

DOI: 10.1016/j.enpol.2013.06.004

Access Statistics for this article

Energy Policy is currently edited by N. France

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