The Greenness of China: Household Carbon Dioxide Emissions and Urban Development

By Siqi Zheng, Rui Wang, Edward L. Glaeser, Matthew E. Kahn. 2011

170 citations recorded by the source corpus.

China urbanization is associated with both increases in per-capita income and greenhouse gas emissions. This paper uses micro data to rank 74 major Chinese cities with respect to their household carbon footprint. We find that the "greenest" cities based on this criterion are Huaian and Suqian while the "dirtiest" cities are Daqing and Mudanjiang. Even in the dirtiest city (Daqing), a standardized household produces only one-fifth of that in America's greenest city (San Diego). We find that the average January temperature is strongly negatively correlated with a city's household carbon footprint, which suggests that current regional economic development policies that bolster the growth of China's northeastern cities are likely to increase emissions. We use our city specific income elasticity estimates to predict the growth of carbon emissions in China's cities.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/30132a95b7af2cad10d805286e754aa871e8952e

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Citations in the corpus

Urban form, shrinking cities, and residential carbon emissions: Evidence from Chinese city-regions (2020, background): “[32] imply that urban polycentricity is often associated with greater housing supply and larger living spaces, which may, in turn, contribute to more electricity consumption and CO2 emissions.”
Understanding China's Urban Pollution Dynamics (2013, methodology): “Zheng et al. (2011) uses a cross-sectional micro dataset of 25 thousand urban households in China to find that the income elasticity of car ownership is 0.63, which suggests that car ownership growth will be lower than income growth.”
Overview of research on China's transition to low-carbon development: The role of cities, technologies, industries and the energy system (2018, background): “In a more systematic reflection, the household sector can be divided into urban households [116,133,27] and rural households [118,57,70].”
Why Do Countries Matter so Much in Corporate Social Performance (2016, unknown): “Zheng et al. (2011) find that the demand for clean air in China increased with income.”