Carbon leakage and low-carbon performance: Heterogeneity of responsibility perspectives

Abstract

As one of the research hotspots in the field of environmental economy, many scholars focus on evaluating low-carbon performance of multiple regions, but almost all of them ignore the impact of carbon leakage. To fill the gap, this paper proposed a new evaluation framework to incorporate carbon leakage by combining the multi-regional input-output table (MRIO), the non-radial directional distance function (NDDF) and the meta-frontier approach. Following the framework, we analyze the performance of 42 countries under three typical carbon responsibility principles, including their low-carbon efficiency and rankings, technology gaps, and emission reduction potential respectively. The main findings are as follows: 1) The carbon leakage and transfer significantly influenced the country's low-carbon performance, mainly by improving the performance level, widening the technology gap, and overestimating the reduction potential, but not affecting the overall ranking structure. 2) Different evaluation method based on heterogenous perspectives can provide complementary information about countries' low-carbon performance. 3) The consumer and equally shared perspectives should gain more attention on the pathway to a cleaner world economy. Synthesizing the results under different perspectives, this paper proposes policy recommendations for different types of countries to promote local low-carbon development.