The effects of urbanization and industrialization on decoupling economic growth from carbon emission – A case study of China

By Qiang Wang, Min Su. Sustainable cities and society, 2019

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Abstract Although many studies have explored the effects of urbanization and industrialization on China’s carbon emissions, no work has systematically investigated their impacts on China’s decoupling of economic growth from carbon emissions. To this end, the Tapio model, the Johansen co-integration theory and the Granger causality test are adopted in this paper. According to the results of decoupling analysis, during the period 1990–2015, China’s carbon emissions and economic growth appear to be strongly decoupled only in a limited number of years, and the remaining years are weakly decoupled. It is necessary for China to strengthen carbon emission reduction. The co-integration test results show that, both in the long-term and short-term, urbanization level is the main driving force to promote decoupling elasticity, contributing to a significant increase in carbon emissions. Due to the scale effect, industrialization exerts an inhibitory impact on decoupling elasticity in the early stage. This means that the economic benefits of industrialization are far greater than the environmental pollution it generates. The consumption structure plays a leading role in restraining the increase of carbon emissions. Based on these results, policy recommendations are put forward for policy makers.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Environmental Engineering, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/79257ca6eaa1ef710c4e1a53e1e863dbc1d7d954