Flow Characteristics and Structural Decomposition Analysis of Embodied Carbon in Trade of China, US, Japan and Korea

In the context of the current trend of trade suspicion among countries, studying on embodied carbon in international trade has great practical significance for the definition of China’s carbon emission responsibility and the formulation of climate policy. Based on the data of the world input-output table, this paper adopt the input-output model to analysis the carbon emission between China, US, Japan and Korea which generated by trade, then uses the structural decomposition to explore the influencing factors of implicit carbon between these four countries. Research shows that China’s export trade implicit carbon to US, Japan and Korea which in the history of China’s export trade implied carbon accounts for about 20%, 14%, 6% respectively. And the trend of China’s export trade implicit carbon is on the rise. Meanwhile, the import trade implicit carbon of China also shows an upward trend. However, China is still a net exporter of implicit carbon. The carbon dioxide generated by the products which from US, Japan and Korea in China accounts for about 6%, 7%, 10% in the China’s annual import trade implied carbon. Obviously, China has undertaken a large part of the emission reduction responsibility for US, Japan and Korea, among them, the scale effect has the most prominent effect on the increase of China’s trade implied carbon, followed by the input-output structure effect, and the energy intensity effect has a prominent negative effect on the increase of trade carbon, and the suppression effect of the carbon emission factor is second. Finally, when formulating trade policies with the United States, Japan and Korea, it is necessary to consider the responsibility sharing and countermeasures of carbon emission reduction.