Economic growth efficiency and carbon reduction efficiency in China: Coupling or decoupling

Abstract

The size of global and China’s economy expanded rapidly in recent years, and working on emission of carbon dioxide increased due to environmental change. The relationship between decoupling, economic growth and carbon dioxide emissions has been examined extensively, but economic growth efficiency can decouple from carbon reduction efficiency is less explore area specially in country like China. Our work extracted respective productive for economic growth and reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, and further evaluated the decoupling relationship at the efficiency level for China’s provinces during 2005–2017. Economic growth efficiency showed a downward trend, whereas the efficiency in the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions showed a slight improvement in the whole of China, which was consistent with China’s strong negative decoupling. All three geographic regions in China had an enormous division between efficiency and its decoupling status. In particular, the eastern provinces had the highest efficiency, but the central region exhibited the highest decoupling. Furthermore, the overall performance of the two efficiency indices declined gradually from the eastern provinces to the western provinces and, over time, more provinces improved their decoupling relationship. Above results also helpful to policy implications, which were conductive to balance economy and environment.