Economic Growth and Climate Change: A Cross-National Analysis of Territorial and Consumption-Based Carbon Emissions in High-Income Countries

By Kyle W. Knight, J. Schor. 2014

216 citations recorded by the source corpus.

An important question in the literature on climate change and sustainability is the relation between economic growth and greenhouse gas emissions. While the “green growth” paradigm dominates in the policy arena, a growing number of scholars in wealthy countries are questioning the feasibility of achieving required emissions reductions with continued economic growth. This paper explores the relationship between economic growth and carbon dioxide emissions over the period 1991–2008 with a balanced data set of 29 high-income countries. We present a variety of models, with particular attention to the difference between territorial emissions and consumption-based (or carbon footprint) emissions, which include the impact of international trade. The effect of economic growth is greater for consumption-based emissions than territorial emissions. We also find that over this period there is some evidence of decoupling between economic growth and territorial emissions, but no evidence of decoupling for consumption-based emissions.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Environmental Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/077e13cfcd5b3fabd217fd3fa6bc6031f42acbf0

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Citations in the corpus

A systematic review of the evidence on decoupling of GDP, resource use and GHG emissions, part II: synthesizing the insights (2020, background): “Exceptions include a group of 18 countries that have reduced CO2 emissions in the last decade (LeQuéré et al 2019), and a few national cases, most of which are due to specific circumstances that probably should not be generalized (e.g. when falling resource use stems from economic crises; Shao et ”
Putting the sharing economy into perspective (2017, background): “64 percent and 1 percent depending on the carbon metric and the type of estimation technique (Knight and Schor 2014).”
The Impact of Energy Consumption and Economic Growth on Carbon Dioxide Emissions (2020, methodology): “This variable has also been used in previous literature [5,50].”
Consumption-Based Accounting and the Trade-Carbon Emissions Nexus in Asia: A Heterogeneous, Common Factor Panel Analysis (2018, unknown): “What is important is that all five of the published papers—as well as the present one—found an insignificant (to mostly insignificant for the case of Reference [23]) impact of trade on territorial-based carbon emissions; and the three papers (References [19,22,23])—as well as the present one—that co”
Wealth Inequality and Carbon Emissions in High-income Countries (2017, methodology): “We allow the effect of wealth inequality to vary over time, a dynamic that has been observed for other anthropogenic drivers of emissions, such as economic development and urbanization (e.g., Jorgenson and Clark 2012; Jorgenson, Auerbach, and Clark 2014; Knight and Schor 2014).”
Corporate Carbon and Financial Performance Revisited (2020, methodology): “Following recent research (e.g., Hussain et al., 2019, Knight & Schor, 2014), we used a Z-test (Clogg et al., 1995; Paternoster et al., 1998) to analyze whether both pairs of coefficients are statistically different from each other.”
Income Inequality and Carbon Emissions in the United States: A State-level Analysis, 1997–2012 (2017, methodology): “Like prior cross-national studies (e.g., Knight and Schor, 2014), we would prefer to analyze both production-based and consumption-based measures of statelevel CO2 emissions, but to the best of our knowledge the latter are currently unavailable in longitudinal form for U.S. states and the District…”
Transforming Consumption: From Decoupling, to Behavior Change, to System Changes for Sustainable Consumption (2015, background): “Population growth and increases in affluence (and consumption) are simply overwhelming efficiency improvements (1, 40, 42, 43, 66).”
Does Energy Productivity and Technological Innovation Limit Trade-Adjusted Carbon Emissions? (2020, background): “Li et al. (2020) investigated energy productivity with renewable energy consumption for OECD economies over the period 1990–2017. The results show that they have positive relation with each other, while Attala and bean (2017) studied Determinants of energy productivity for 39 countries for 1995–2009”