EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Carbon inequality in China: Evidence from city-level data

Shimei Wu and Zhan-Ming Chen ()

China Economic Review, 2023, vol. 78, issue C

Abstract: Carbon inequality has attracted increasing attention worldwide. Utilizing data from China's High Spatial Resolution Emission Gridded Database (CHRED), this paper presents the measured CO2 emission inequality in China for the years 2005, 2012, 2015, and 2020. Results show that the Gini coefficients of carbon emission report a slight decrease from 0.411 to 0.385 and the distribution becomes more symmetric from 2005 to 2020. Linking carbon inequality to economic level, the positive concentration index (0.230 to 0.118) indicates asymmetricity between carbon emission and economic development. A further decomposition analysis reveals the industrial sector's uneven development, indicating that energy-intensive features can be blamed for a large proportion of carbon inequality. Our findings suggest that policymakers should not consider economic development level alone as the only indicator of the allocation of abatement, as economic structure, energy intensity, and climate conditions are all responsible for such inequality.

Keywords: Carbon inequality; Gini; Concentration index; Decomposition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D39 D63 Q54 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1043951X23000251
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:chieco:v:78:y:2023:i:c:s1043951x23000251

DOI: 10.1016/j.chieco.2023.101940

Access Statistics for this article

China Economic Review is currently edited by B.M. Fleisher, K. X. D. Huang, M.E. Lovely, Y. Wen, X. Zhang and X. Zhu

More articles in China Economic Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-04-07
Handle: RePEc:eee:chieco:v:78:y:2023:i:c:s1043951x23000251