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Carbon emission intensity and biased technical change in China’s different regions: a novel multidimensional decomposition approach

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Abstract

The decomposition analysis has been employed to discover the driving factors of carbon emission intensity, but the current studies assume that production functions are under the condition of the neutral technical change. Grounded on biased technical change production theory, this paper proposes a novel multidimensional decomposition approach which combines production-theory decomposition analysis (PDA) and index decomposition analysis (IDA). This novel approach can illustrate how energy structure effect, element substitution effect, efficiency change effect, input biased technical change, output biased technical change and magnitude of technical change affect carbon emission intensity of China’s 30 provinces. The results indicate that during the 11th FYP and 13th FYP, output biased technical change and the magnitude of technical change are the critical factors in China’s carbon emission intensity, while other four drivers increase carbon emissions. But, during the 12th FYP, the role of six drivers has been reversed contrasting 11th FYP and 13th FYP. In addition, we also explore the impact of each driver from the perspective of regional heterogeneity.

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Availability of data and materials

The datasets generated and analyzed during the current study are available in the National Bureau of Statistics of China and Ministry of Ecology and Environment of the People's Republic of China repository, http://www.stats.gov.cn/english/Statisticaldata/AnnualData/ and http://english.mee.gov.cn/Resources/Reports/.

Notes

  1. The data is from the Ministry of Ecology and Environment of the People’s Republic of China in 2019.

  2. The data is from the National Bureau of Statistics of China.

  3. FYP means five-year plan in China, which is a kind of state developing strategy. In fact, the 13th Five-Year Plan is 2016–2020, but due to data limitations, our study period only covers 2019.

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Funding

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 71973132) and National Social Science Fund of China (No. 19VHQ002).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Economics, Ocean University of China, Qingdao, China

    Lili Ding, Kaixuan Zhang & Ying Yang

  2. Marine Development Studies Institute of OUC, Key Research Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences at Universities, Ministry of Education, Qingdao, China

    Lili Ding

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  1. Lili Ding
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  2. Kaixuan Zhang
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  3. Ying Yang
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Contributions

LD designed the study and wrote and reviewed the manuscript; KZ contributed to the writing of the final version of the manuscript; YY collected the data and analyzed the data and wrote the manuscript. All authors have read and approved the final version of the paper.

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Correspondence to Ying Yang.

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Table 3

Table 3 Region and their abbreviation
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Ding, L., Zhang, K. & Yang, Y. Carbon emission intensity and biased technical change in China’s different regions: a novel multidimensional decomposition approach. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29, 38083–38096 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-18098-7

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