Abstract
Under the pressure of low-carbon development at county level in China, this paper takes Jiangsu province as an example to analyze the relationship between economic growth and carbon emissions, aiming to provide a reference for the low-carbon development in Jiangsu and other regions in China. Based on the county-level panel data from 2000 to 2017, this paper uses the Tapio elasticity model and environmental Kuznets curve model, and focuses on the differences in regional economic development and the impacts of the 2008 global economic crisis. The results show that, in general, the decoupling effect of carbon emissions in Jiangsu counties has gradually increased during the study period. Since 2011, all counties achieved the speed decoupling, with more than half of them showing strong decoupling. The environmental Kuznets curves of carbon emissions in different income groups are established, and changed before and after the 2008 global economic crisis. In 2017, only 10 of the 53 counties were on the right side of the curve, realizing the quantity decoupling between the two. Therefore, to achieve a win–win situation between carbon emission reduction and economic growth, efforts should be made from the aspects of industrial structure and energy efficiency, and measures should be taken according to local conditions.
Highlights
Global warming, which is caused by greenhouse gas emissions, still remains one of the serious challenges facing human beings at present [1–4].In order to ensure that the increase in global average temperature is kept within 2 ◦ C from pre-industrial levels, countries around the world are actively implementing carbon emissions reduction actions [5–7]
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita significantly inhibited carbon dioxide emissions per capita [58], there was no clear evidence to show the inverted U-shaped relationship between economic growth and carbon dioxide emissions in West Africa [59,60], and the growth of GDP in five North African countries led to an increase in carbon dioxide emissions [61]; all these results disagreed with the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis
Compared with the previous studies, this paper has three contributions. To our knowledge, this is the first study to explore the dynamic relationship between carbon emissions and economic growth at the county level in China, and its conclusions can provide a reference for county low-carbon transformation
Summary
Global warming, which is caused by greenhouse gas emissions (mainly carbon dioxide emissions), still remains one of the serious challenges facing human beings at present [1–4]. This paper chooses Jiangsu province as an example to examine the decoupling relationship between carbon emissions and economic growth in China’s counties. Throughout the relevant literature, the decoupling analysis and environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis are two useful analysis tools The former describes the correlation between economic growth and carbon emissions from a short-term and real-time perspective [4,11], which is a speed decoupling analysis. The latter assumes that in the early stage of economic development, pollution emissions increase with the level of economic development, and, after crossing the turning point, pollution emissions decrease with the level of economic development [12,13].
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