Nicolai Baumert

Gästforskare

The technology-adjusted balance of emissions embodied in trade: Assessing global carbon emission displacement from 1995 to 2009

Författare

Nicolai Baumert

Summary, in English

Increasing global production fragmentation allows for emission displacement, which may counteract advanced nation’s domestic reductions of production-related carbon emissions. Consequently, input-output analysis has become a common tool to measure countries’ carbon footprint and emission trade balances based on national consumption instead of domestically produced CO2 emissions. Nevertheless, traditional consumption-based indicators insufficiently account for cross-country discrepancies in production technologies or energy systems when quantifying actual emission displacement. By introducing the technology-adjusted balance of emissions embodied in trade we correct for these differences, identify global emission displacement from 1995-2009 and decompose it into the impact of its underlying drivers – trade specialization and the monetary trade balance. We find that Anglophone countries and particularly the USA have been net importers of carbon emissions as they specialized in carbon-heavy imports relative to less CO2-intensive exports and – especially in the US-American case – showed a drastic monetary trade deficit from 1995-2009. Conversely, most European countries did not display suchlike trade specializations and – driven by monetary trade surpluses – have largely been net exporters of carbon emissions. Furthermore, China is – other than most emerging economies and mainly based on increasing specialization in more carbon-intensive exports than imports – identified as the major net exporter of emissions. These distinctions, suggesting that carbon trade patterns across the developed and developing world have recently been far from clear-cut, represent a novel finding in the emission displacement literature.

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