Changing lifestyles and consumption patterns in developing countries: A scenario analysis for China and India
Section snippets
Catching up with the ‘North’
Ever increasing consumption is putting a strain on the environment, polluting the Earth and destroying ecosystems [1]. Large-scale economic development in the North occurring in the first half of the last century has left deep marks on the availability and quality of natural resources. These are dangerous side-effects of the development model the North follows and the South emulates. Changing lifestyles and consumption patterns has been a common feature of most developing Asian nations in
Economic development
The latter half of the 20th century was a period of the ‘economic miracle’ for Asian countries. Asian countries such as Japan, South Korea and Singapore achieved a high annual growth rate of GDP per capita at an average of 8% during the 1960s–1970s. They achieved industrialisation, motorisation and wealth in a short time period of about 20–30 years while China and India were almost closed economies with central planning1
Growing economy, population and technical change
We employ the I=PAT framework to examine the contribution to CO2 emissions of population growth, affluence (representing different lifestyles and consumption patterns) and changes in technologies of China and India and compare these with the development in Japan.
The I=PAT equation was first proposed in the early 1970s (e.g., [9], [10], [11]), and resulted from the efforts of population biologists, ecologists, and environmental scientists who tried to assess the relationship between population
A thought experiment using I=PAT
China and India are among the fastest growing economies in the world contributing significantly to global resource depletion, pollution and global warming. Previous studies have intensively discussed whether technology improvements are the solution to preventing environmental degradation while developing the economy, (e.g. [15], [16], [17]). Therefore in this analysis, we try to examine which efficiency gains would be necessary to compensate for China's and India's rapid population and economic
A case study for changes in energy consumption in China
The significant economic and lifestyle changes that have been taking place in China, have led the Chinese to require more and better quality of energy. People directly consume energy for lighting, cooking and other daily uses. But they also aspire to a ‘higher-quality life’ by purchasing fashionable goods and services, such as houses with air conditioning and other modern electrical household appliances, as well as the weekly visit to the gym. All these products and services consume energy
Conclusions and outlook
Since the economic reforms both China and India have experienced significant economic growth accompanied by enormous environmental pollution and increasing income inequalities. At the same time the gap between the poorer and the richer countries has not significantly decreased.
In addition, national averages often obscure the similarities among different consumption classes across state borders. The United Nations Human Development Program [23] divided world economic activities into five income
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank to Shilpa Rao, International Institute of Applied System Analysis (IIASA), Austria, and Masahito Takahashi, Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry, Japan, for their help with data collection.
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