EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Divergence in State-Level Per Capita Carbon Dioxide Emissions

Joseph Aldy

RFF Working Paper Series from Resources for the Future

Abstract: Decisionmakers considering policies to mitigate climate change will benefit from information about current and future distributions of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Examining the emissions dynamics of advanced economies that have experienced income convergence could provide insights about how distributions of country-level emissions may evolve over time if country-level incomes eventually undergo some convergence. This paper addresses the question of whether income convergence is sufficient for per capita CO2 emissions convergence by focusing on a set of advanced economies, the U.S. states. I undertake a variety of cross-sectional and stochastic convergence tests with two novel measures of 1960–1999 state-level CO2 emissions per capita—production (pre-electricity trade) CO2 and consumption (post-electricity trade) CO2—and with income per capita. Although incomes continue to converge, I find stark divergence in production CO2 per capita and no evidence of convergence for consumption CO2 per capita. Forecasts of future distributions show little convergence in emissions.

Keywords: Markov chain transition matrix; sigma convergence; stochastic convergence; emissions distributions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O40 Q54 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-02-09
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 (203)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.rff.org/RFF/documents/RFF-DP-06-07.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-06-07.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.rff.org/RFF/documents/RFF-DP-06-07.pdf)

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:rff:dpaper:dp-06-07

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 ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:rff:dpaper:dp-06-07