Do Carbon Emissions and Economic Growth Decouple in China? An Empirical Analysis Based on Provincial Panel Data

Yu Hao, Zirui Huang and Haitao Wu ()
Additional contact information
Zirui Huang: School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China

Energies, 2019, vol. 12, issue 12, 1-15

Abstract: Global warming has emerged as a serious threat to humans and sustainable development. China is under increasing pressure to curb its carbon emissions as the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide. By combining the Tapio decoupling model and the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) framework, this paper explores the relationship between China’s carbon emissions and economic growth. Based on panel data of 29 provinces from 2007 to 2016, this paper quantitatively estimates the nexus of carbon emissions and economic development for the whole nation and the decoupling status of individual provinces. There is empirical evidence for the conventional EKC hypothesis, showing that the relationship between carbon emissions and per capita gross domestic product (GDP) is an inverted U shape and that the inflection point will not be attained soon. Moreover, following the estimation results of the Tapio decoupling model, there were significant differences between individual provinces in decoupling status. As a result, differentiated and targeted environmental regulations and policies regarding energy consumption and carbon emissions should be reasonably formulated for different provinces and regions based on the corresponding level of economic development and decoupling status.

Keywords: environmental Kuznets curve (EKC); decoupling theory; panel data; differential GMM estimation; Tapio decoupling model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/12/12/2411/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/12/12/2411/ (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:jeners:v:12:y:2019:i:12:p:2411-:d:242307

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

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