Per Capita Carbon Dioxide Emissions: Convergence or Divergence?

Joseph Aldy

RFF Working Paper Series 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: emissions distributions; environmental Kuznets curve; Markov chain transition matrix (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O40 Q54 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005-11-23
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env and nep-for
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.rff.org/RFF/documents/RFF-DP-05-53.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.rff.org/RFF/documents/RFF-DP-05-53.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.rff.org/RFF/documents/RFF-DP-05-53.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:rff:dpaper:dp-05-53

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in RFF Working Paper Series from Resources for the Future Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Resources for the Future ().