The economic catch-up of developing countries has mitigated inter-country carbon inequality

Abstract

The rapid economic development in developing countries helps to achieve the United Nations's sustainable development goals (SDGs) of reducing inequality. However, the relatively high carbon intensity in these countries raises concerns about carbon mitigation, another SDGs. This poses challenges for the synergy between the two SDGs of reducing inequality and carbon emissions. Based an environmental extended multi-regional input-output model, we analyzed the differences in production-, consumption-, and income-based emissions between different income country groups, as well as the global Gini coefficients of production-, consumption-, and income-based emission, to provide insights for understanding the inter-country carbon inequality in a full supply chain perspective. The results show that the inter-country carbon inequality continued to decline during 2007–2017, especially in 2011–2014, the global Gini coefficient of production-based carbon emissions decreased from 0.54 to 0.50, while the Gini coefficients of consumption- and income-based emissions were always greater than that of production-based emissions. In addition, many high-income countries are not only net importers of embodied emissions, but also net exporters of value added. Finally, this study indicated that the middle-income countries represented by China were the main contributors to curb the growth of global carbon emissions during 2014–2017.