The Decomposition Analysis of Carbon Emissions: Theoretical Basis, Methods and Their Evaluations

Shenning Qu ()
Additional contact information
Shenning Qu: Institute of Industrial Economics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, No. 1 Dongchang Hutong, Dongcheng District, Beijing 100006, China

Chinese Journal of Urban and Environmental Studies (CJUES), 2020, vol. 08, issue 04, 1-18

Abstract: As an analytical framework for studying the characteristics of changes in things and their action mechanisms, the decomposition analysis of greenhouse gas emissions has been increasingly used in environmental economics research. The author introduces several decomposition methods commonly used at present and compares them. The index decomposition analysis (IDA) of carbon emissions usually uses energy identities to express carbon emissions as the product of several factor indexes, and decomposes them according to different weight-determining methods to clarify the incremental share of each index, in which way it is possible to decompose the models that contain less factors, process time series data, and conduct cross-country comparisons. It mainly includes the Laspeyres index decomposition and the Divisia index decomposition. Among them, the LMDI I method has been widely used for its advantages such as generating no residuals and easy to use. The structural decomposition analysis (SDA) can be used to conduct a more systematic analysis, decompose models with more influencing factors, and analyze the impacts of various factors on emissions, but this method has higher requirements for data collection. The biggest difference between the SDA method and the IDA methods of carbon emissions is that the former is based on an input–output system, while the latter only needs to use sectors’ aggregate data.

Keywords: Carbon emissions; index decomposition analysis (IDA); structural decomposition analysis (SDA); LMDI I (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S2345748120500207
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

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:wsi:cjuesx:v:08:y:2020:i:04:n:s2345748120500207

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

DOI: 10.1142/S2345748120500207

Access Statistics for this article

Chinese Journal of Urban and Environmental Studies (CJUES) is currently edited by PAN Jiahua

More articles in Chinese Journal of Urban and Environmental Studies (CJUES) from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().