China's Embodied CO2 Emissions: Based on UV Tables

UV tables, rather than input-output table adopted in most literature, are used to analyze the embodied CO2 emissions of China in this paper. This method can avoid overestimating the embodied emission coefficients, the key factor to estimate the total emissions. Based on the assumption of "emissions avoided by imports" (EAI), we calculated China's emissions embodied within products manufactured domestically (EEP) and those within products consumed domestically (EEC) in 1997,2002 and 2007. The result shows that all of EEP exceeded EEC in the three years. The diffences (EEB) were 575.85, 627.30 and 1834.12 million tons, being 17.15%, 17.16% and 27.20% of EEP respectively. It means approximate 1/6 similar to 1/4 of per unit CO2 manufactured in China was consumed "purely" by other countries, also called "carbon leakage". Furthermore,we built a fixed effects model to detect the factors influcing the emission coefficients. It is found that technical progress will be helpful to decrease the coefficients, meanwhile, the total emissions.