A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON GLOBAL CARBON EMISSION INEQUALITY: INSIGHTS FROM GLOBAL INTERPERSONAL CARBON GINI-INDEX

摘要

The issue of global inequality in carbon emission is one of the main debate focuses across countries related to the abatement responsibility. This paper contributes to existing studies by developing a global interpersonal carbon gini index to illustrate the global carbon inequality at personal level. Due to the great flexibility and availability of data, this study adopts the carbon Lorenz curve and carbon Gini-index to measure the interpersonal carbon inequality level among 190 Countries. The carbon Lorenz curves for various countries are generated according to the income distribution data and the assumption of the relationship between household income and carbon emission of each country in line with studies from peer reviewed literatures. Furthermore, This study also examines the the difference of global interpersonal carbon inequality level respectively estimated under the production based emission data and consumption based emission data of all these countries. The result gives a clear indication that the Gini-index has an obvious decreasing tendency during the study period, , and it’s caused mainly by the increase of per capital emission in developing countries, which is demonstrated by the decomposition analysis. In parallel, the global interpersonal carbon Gini-index calculated under consumption based emission is higher than production based emission, especially true for recent years, which is corresponsive to the fact that the development of internationa trade has significantly strengthened the transferred emission across developed and developing countries.