Research on carbon emissions in China's export trade based on input-output model

Becoming the world's largest emitter of carbon makes China the object of criticism; however, people may ignore the fact that when China exports low-carbon products, the carbon emissions have been left in the meanwhile, forming the so-called “embodied carbon”. Using the input-output model, this paper analyzes the carbon emission intensity and amount of embodied carbon of various sectors in China's export trade in 2002 and 2007, and filters out high carbon emission sectors. In addition, this paper also points out the problem of carbon emissions’ international transfer from developed countries to China through the analysis of national and regional flow of export carbon emissions and changing of the proportion of emissions for exports relative to total emissions, and explains the reason that caused carbon transfer to China by using the treadmill of production theory. Based on that, this paper proposes some measures for carbon reduction in China from the foreign trade perspective.