posted on 2020-11-25, 09:50authored byHongguang Liu, Klaus Lackner, Xiaomei Fan
<p>Embodied carbon emissions research is an important branch of climate change study. Some scholars have noted the value-added chains associated with the carbon emissions embodied in international trade. But they have not covered the global scale and the entire demand-supply chains. This paper tries to investigate this issue and answer how much value-added is gained by countries, especially developing regions that are the main carbon emissions suppliers in the world, and how this value-added changed during 2000–2014, based on the multi-regional input-output table. The conclusions are, on a global average, the value-added gained per unit of carbon emissions embodied in the global demand-supply chain had increased, but it had not brought net value-added to developing regions but instead caused them a net loss of wealth, mainly because developing regions should pay more value-added for their increasingly external demand.</p>
Funding
We are grateful for the support of the China National Statistics Bureau’s National Key Project of Statistical Science Research (2018LZ34), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41971107) and the Jiangsu Provincial Social Science Fund (18EYD007).