Carbon emissions from the entire production cycle

What is it about?

This study expands the input-output relationship into the production-consumption relationship. It uses optimized data of the relationship between household consumption and production industry to calculate the entire production-side carbon emissions, including from capital formation, of Chinese household consumption, and uses LMDI model to analyze the factors affecting the growth of carbon emissions from Chinese household consumption.

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Photo by koushik das on Unsplash

Photo by koushik das on Unsplash

Why is it important?

In summary, given the current problems in the study of household consumption carbon emissions, the main contributions of this paper are as follows. (1) In contrast with the existing literature, which links some types of household consumption to some production industries as a whole, this study constructs a relationship matrix between different types of household consumption and the related production industries using the difference between household consumption data and input-output data. It then uses the cross-entropy method to optimize this relationship systematically and calculate optimized data on the relationship between consumption and production industries. (2) This study regards capital formation as a kind of input in current production and improves the traditional Leontief inverse matrix by utilizing the relationship among current input, output, and consumption. The carbon emissions of all production links including capital input are assumed to be based on the consumption of residents, and the carbon emissions of the entire production cycle of household consumption are then obtained. (3) This study analyzes the characteristics of carbon emissions in the entire production cycle for different types of household consumption, studies the contribution of household consumption carbon intensity, consumption structure, and income level; urbanization level; and population size to the change in the carbon emissions for the entire production cycle related to Chinese household consumption. It then puts forward policy recommendations for the reduction of carbon emission from the perspective of household consumption. This study comprehensively and systematically calculates the carbon emissions of the complete production cycle of different categories of household consumption. It also explores the impact of various factors, and then provides a theoretical reference with which the government can formulate carbon emission reduction policies from the perspective of household consumption and guide residents on implementing low-carbon consumption.

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