Distributional impact of carbon pricing in Chinese provinces

Qian Wang, Klaus Hubacek, Kuishuang Feng, Lin Guo, Kun Zhang, Jinjun Xue and Qiao-Mei Liang

Energy Economics, 2019, vol. 81, issue C, 327-340

Abstract: Based on a Multi-Regional Input-Output (MRIO) model, and combined with the 2012 MRIO table for 30 Chinese provinces, this paper analyzes the distributional impacts of carbon pricing on households within and across Chinese provinces. The results show regressive distributional effects of carbon pricing across provinces, i.e. poor provinces are affected more by the price. Carbon pricing also shows rural-urban regressivity (i.e. rural households are impacted more heavily than urban households) in more than half of the provinces. Within each selected province, carbon pricing has mostly regressive effects, i.e. poorer urban households are more affected than richer urban households in all provinces and poorer rural households more than richer rural households in one third of the provinces. When looking more specifically at direct energy consumption, we find that the carbon pricing on domestic fuels generally shows regressivity, while pricing carbon on transport fuels shows progressivity. In addition, the impact of carbon pricing on residential direct expenditures (mainly on electricity and coal) is the most important contributor to the regional regressivity across provinces.

Keywords: Carbon pricing; Carbon tax; Income distribution; Inequality; Climate change; Input-output analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q01 Q43 Q52 Q56 Q57 R15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140988319301094
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:81:y:2019:i:c:p:327-340

DOI: 10.1016/j.eneco.2019.04.003

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 ().