Is China's economic growth decoupled from carbon emissions?

Abstract

A comprehensive understanding of the interdependence between China's economy and carbon emissions can better serve China's transition towards a low-carbon economy, and can also provide reference for other developing countries. The purpose of this paper was to investigate the dependence of China's economy on CO2 emissions: (i) the Tapio decoupling model was applied to quantify the decoupling elasticity between China's economy and CO2 emissions; (ii) the structure decomposition technique was utilized to quantity the contribution of China's economic structure to the decoupling elasticity; (iii) the combined decomposition model which combined Cobb–Douglas (C-D) production function with Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index (LMDI) technique and was solved the residual problem was employed to identify more driving factors (labor input, investment, carbon coefficient, energy structure, energy intensity, economic structure, and technology state) affecting the decoupling elasticity. The main results were as follows: (i) The decoupling elasticity showed a downward trend during the whole period, and the decoupling state was characterized by two types: expansive negative decoupling (2002–2005) and weak decoupling (2000–2002 and 2005–2014). (ii) The industry sector played the most negative effect on the decoupling process expect 2013–2014. From the cumulative effect, the contribution of six sectors to promote decoupling effect was ranked as follows: Construction > Agriculture > Trade > Other > Transport > Industry. (iii) The most critical factor driving the increased CO2 emissions was the investment effect, accounting for 145.34% of the cumulative total CO2 emissions, while the energy intensity effect contributed to a cumulative reduction in CO2 emissions of 1443.72 Mt. Finally, some policy recommendations were offered to achieve the decoupling of China's economic growth and carbon emissions.