Extracting critical supply chains driving air pollution in China

Tracing the air pollutant emissions along the supply is helpful to comprehensively understand the source of emissions embodied in final products and the destination of direct emissions from production sectors. Based on the harmonized datasets on China's nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, and soot & dust emissions and the input-output framework in 2015, we newly account the production-based and consumption-based emissions and adopt structural path analysis (SPA) to extract the critical sectors and supply chains for air pollution co-control. The findings indicate that the sectors of Power and Heat, Metals Smelting and Non-metallic Mineral Products are major contributors to production-based emissions; The sectors of Construction, Equipment and Services are major contributors to consumption-based emissions. The embodied emissions in production layer 0 account for only 11%-16% for three pollutants, with over 50% of emissions attributed to production layer 1. The paths "from total capital formation to Construction to Non-metallic Mineral Products" and "from total capital formation to Construction to Metals Smelting" are the top two critical paths for the emissions of three pollutants. The sectors of Equipment and Service are also critical sectors in the supply chains, which rely heavily on the inputs from themselves. As an attempt on combining SPA with multiple air pollutants, this study is expected to provide insights into the relationships among production sectors, final demand, supply chains and air pollutant emissions, and design policy interventions targeting air pollution co-control. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.