Per Capita Carbon Dioxide Emissions: Convergence or Divergence?

Joseph Aldy

No 10773, Discussion Papers from Resources for the Future

Abstract: Understanding and considering the distribution of per capita carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions is important in designing international climate change proposals and incentives for participation. I evaluate historic international emissions distributions and forecast future distributions to assess whether per capita emissions have been converging or will converge. I find evidence of convergence among 23 member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), whereas emissions appear to be diverging for an 88-country global sample over 1960-2000. Forecasts based on a Markov chain transition matrix provide little evidence of future emissions convergence and indicate that emissions may diverge in the near term. I also review the shortcomings of environmental Kuznets curve regressions and structural models in characterizing future emissions distributions.

Keywords: Environmental; Economics; and; Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35
Date: 2005
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/10773/files/dp050053.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Per Capita Carbon Dioxide Emissions: Convergence or Divergence? (2006)
Working Paper: Per Capita Carbon Dioxide Emissions: Convergence or Divergence? (2005)
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:ags:rffdps:10773

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.10773

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Resources for the Future Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().