IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/eneeco/v66y2017icp182-193.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Size distribution of national CO2 emissions

Author

Listed:
  • Akhundjanov, Sherzod B.
  • Devadoss, Stephen
  • Luckstead, Jeff

Abstract

We examine the size distribution of national carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions on a sample of 210 countries and territories for the period 2000–2010. We employ lognormal, double Pareto-lognormal, lognormal-upper tail Pareto, and Pareto tails-lognormal distributions to estimate CO2 size distribution. The analysis demonstrates that the lognormal-Pareto composite distributions generally fit the size distribution of CO2 emissions better than the lognormal distribution. The parametric analysis reveals that the upper-tail of CO2 emissions is characterized by Zipf's law. The power law in the upper-tail implies that large countries emit much of the CO2. When controlling for population, Zipf's law no longer holds, but per capita CO2 emissions still exhibit a strong Pareto upper tail.

Suggested Citation

  • Akhundjanov, Sherzod B. & Devadoss, Stephen & Luckstead, Jeff, 2017. "Size distribution of national CO2 emissions," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 66(C), pages 182-193.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:eneeco:v:66:y:2017:i:c:p:182-193
    DOI: 10.1016/j.eneco.2017.06.012
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140988317302062
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.eneco.2017.06.012?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. John Sutton, 1997. "Gibrat's Legacy," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 35(1), pages 40-59, March.
    2. Luckstead, Jeff & Devadoss, Stephen, 2014. "Do the world’s largest cities follow Zipf’s and Gibrat’s laws?," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 125(2), pages 182-186.
    3. Miguel Puente-Ajovín & Arturo Ramos, 2015. "On the parametric description of the French, German, Italian and Spanish city size distributions," The Annals of Regional Science, Springer;Western Regional Science Association, vol. 54(2), pages 489-509, March.
    4. Chesher, Andrew, 1979. "Testing the Law of Proportionate Effect," Journal of Industrial Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 27(4), pages 403-411, June.
    5. Luckstead, Jeff & Devadoss, Stephen, 2017. "Pareto tails and lognormal body of US cities size distribution," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 465(C), pages 573-578.
    6. Klass, Oren S. & Biham, Ofer & Levy, Moshe & Malcai, Ofer & Solomon, Sorin, 2006. "The Forbes 400 and the Pareto wealth distribution," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 90(2), pages 290-295, February.
    7. Alexis Akira Toda & Kieran Walsh, 2015. "The Double Power Law in Consumption and Implications for Testing Euler Equations," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 123(5), pages 1177-1200.
    8. Xavier Gabaix, 2009. "Power Laws in Economics and Finance," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 1(1), pages 255-294, May.
    9. William J. Reed, 2002. "On the Rank‐Size Distribution for Human Settlements," Journal of Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 42(1), pages 1-17, February.
    10. Singh, S K & Maddala, G S, 1976. "A Function for Size Distribution of Incomes," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 44(5), pages 963-970, September.
    11. Richard Schmalensee & Thomas M. Stoker & Ruth A. Judson, 1998. "World Carbon Dioxide Emissions: 1950-2050," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 80(1), pages 15-27, February.
    12. Xu, Bin & Lin, Boqiang, 2015. "How industrialization and urbanization process impacts on CO2 emissions in China: Evidence from nonparametric additive regression models," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 48(C), pages 188-202.
    13. Toda, Alexis Akira, 2017. "A Note On The Size Distribution Of Consumption: More Double Pareto Than Lognormal," Macroeconomic Dynamics, Cambridge University Press, vol. 21(6), pages 1508-1518, September.
    14. Carvalho, Terciane Sabadini & Santiago, Flaviane Souza & Perobelli, Fernando Salgueiro, 2013. "International trade and emissions: The case of the Minas Gerais state — 2005," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 40(C), pages 383-395.
    15. Devadoss, Stephen & Luckstead, Jeff & Danforth, Diana & Akhundjanov, Sherzod, 2016. "The power law distribution for lower tail cities in India," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 442(C), pages 193-196.
    16. Reed, William J., 2001. "The Pareto, Zipf and other power laws," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 74(1), pages 15-19, December.
    17. Ioannides, Yannis M. & Overman, Henry G., 2003. "Zipf's law for cities: an empirical examination," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 33(2), pages 127-137, March.
    18. Ioannides, Yannis & Skouras, Spyros, 2013. "US city size distribution: Robustly Pareto, but only in the tail," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 73(1), pages 18-29.
    19. Geoffrey B. West & James H. Brown & Brian J. Enquist, 1997. "A General Model for the Origin of Allometric Scaling Laws in Biology," Working Papers 97-03-019, Santa Fe Institute.
    20. Martin L. Weitzman, 2014. "Fat Tails and the Social Cost of Carbon," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 104(5), pages 544-546, May.
    21. Stanley, Michael H. R. & Buldyrev, Sergey V. & Havlin, Shlomo & Mantegna, Rosario N. & Salinger, Michael A. & Eugene Stanley, H., 1995. "Zipf plots and the size distribution of firms," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 49(4), pages 453-457, October.
    22. Xavier Gabaix, 1999. "Zipf's Law for Cities: An Explanation," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 114(3), pages 739-767.
    23. Kim, Kyunam & Kim, Yeonbae, 2012. "International comparison of industrial CO2 emission trends and the energy efficiency paradox utilizing production-based decomposition," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 34(5), pages 1724-1741.
    24. Devadoss, Stephen & Luckstead, Jeff, 2016. "Size distribution of U.S. lower tail cities," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 444(C), pages 158-162.
    25. Sadorsky, Perry, 2014. "The effect of urbanization on CO2 emissions in emerging economies," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 41(C), pages 147-153.
    26. Luckstead, Jeff & Devadoss, Stephen, 2014. "A comparison of city size distributions for China and India from 1950 to 2010," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 124(2), pages 290-295.
    27. Andrew Balthrop, 2016. "Power laws in oil and natural gas production," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 51(4), pages 1521-1539, December.
    28. Erzo G. J. Luttmer, 2007. "Selection, Growth, and the Size Distribution of Firms," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 122(3), pages 1103-1144.
    29. Toda, Alexis Akira, 2012. "The double power law in income distribution: Explanations and evidence," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 84(1), pages 364-381.
    30. Stanley Sclove, 1987. "Application of model-selection criteria to some problems in multivariate analysis," Psychometrika, Springer;The Psychometric Society, vol. 52(3), pages 333-343, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Rafael González-Val, 2021. "The Probability Distribution of Worldwide Forest Areas," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(3), pages 1-19, January.
    2. Duro, Juan Antonio & Giménez-Gómez, José-Manuel & Vilella, Cori, 2020. "The allocation of CO2 emissions as a claims problem," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 86(C).
    3. Peña, Guillermo & Puente-Ajovín, Miguel & Ramos, Arturo & Sanz-Gracia, Fernando, 2022. "Log-growth rates of CO2: An empirical analysis," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 588(C).
    4. Sherzod B. Akhundjanov & Tatiana Drugova, 2022. "On the growth process of US agricultural land," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 63(3), pages 1727-1740, September.
    5. Duro Moreno, Juan Antonio & Giménez-Gómez, José Manuel & Sánchez-Soriano, Joaquín & Vilella Bach, Misericòrdia, 2022. "Allocating remaining carbon budgets and mitigation costs," Working Papers 2072/535074, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Department of Economics.
    6. Behzod B. Ahundjanov & Sherzod B. Akhundjanov & Botir B. Okhunjanov, 2022. "Power law in COVID‐19 cases in China," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 185(2), pages 699-719, April.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Behzod B. Ahundjanov & Sherzod B. Akhundjanov & Botir B. Okhunjanov, 2022. "Power law in COVID‐19 cases in China," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 185(2), pages 699-719, April.
    2. Luckstead, Jeff & Devadoss, Stephen & Danforth, Diana, 2017. "The size distributions of all Indian cities," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 474(C), pages 237-249.
    3. Arturo, Ramos, 2019. "Have the log-population processes stationary and independent increments? Empirical evidence for Italy, Spain and the USA along more than a century," MPRA Paper 93562, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    4. Ramos, Arturo & Sanz-Gracia, Fernando & González-Val, Rafael, 2013. "A new framework for the US city size distribution: Empirical evidence and theory," MPRA Paper 52190, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    5. Brendan K. Beare & Alexis Akira Toda, 2022. "Determination of Pareto Exponents in Economic Models Driven by Markov Multiplicative Processes," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 90(4), pages 1811-1833, July.
    6. Toda, Alexis Akira, 2019. "Wealth distribution with random discount factors," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 104(C), pages 101-113.
    7. Beare, Brendan K & Toda, Alexis Akira, 2020. "On the emergence of a power law in the distribution of COVID-19 cases," University of California at San Diego, Economics Working Paper Series qt9k5027d0, Department of Economics, UC San Diego.
    8. Ramos, Arturo & Sanz-Gracia, Fernando, 2015. "US city size distribution revisited: Theory and empirical evidence," MPRA Paper 64051, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    9. Alexis Akira Toda & Yulong Wang, 2021. "Efficient minimum distance estimation of Pareto exponent from top income shares," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 36(2), pages 228-243, March.
    10. Rafael González-Val, 2019. "US city-size distribution and space," Spatial Economic Analysis, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 14(3), pages 283-300, July.
    11. Gualandi, Stefano & Toscani, Giuseppe, 2019. "Size distribution of cities: A kinetic explanation," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 524(C), pages 221-234.
    12. Devadoss, Stephen & Luckstead, Jeff, 2016. "Size distribution of U.S. lower tail cities," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 444(C), pages 158-162.
    13. Peña, Guillermo & Puente-Ajovín, Miguel & Ramos, Arturo & Sanz-Gracia, Fernando, 2022. "Log-growth rates of CO2: An empirical analysis," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 588(C).
    14. Xavier Gabaix, 2009. "Power Laws in Economics and Finance," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 1(1), pages 255-294, May.
    15. Toda, Alexis Akira, 2017. "A Note On The Size Distribution Of Consumption: More Double Pareto Than Lognormal," Macroeconomic Dynamics, Cambridge University Press, vol. 21(6), pages 1508-1518, September.
    16. Arturo Ramos & Till Massing & Atushi Ishikawa & Shouji Fujimoto & Takayuki Mizuno, 2023. "Composite distributions in the social sciences: A comparative empirical study of firms' sales distribution for France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, and Spain," Papers 2301.09438, arXiv.org.
    17. Arshad, Sidra & Hu, Shougeng & Ashraf, Badar Nadeem, 2019. "Zipf’s law, the coherence of the urban system and city size distribution: Evidence from Pakistan," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 513(C), pages 87-103.
    18. Ramos, Arturo, 2015. "Log-growth distributions of US city sizes and non-Lévy processes," MPRA Paper 66561, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    19. Sherzod B. Akhundjanov & Alexis Akira Toda, 2020. "Is Gibrat’s “Economic Inequality” lognormal?," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 59(5), pages 2071-2091, November.
    20. Safari, Muhammad Aslam Mohd & Masseran, Nurulkamal & Ibrahim, Kamarulzaman & Hussain, Saiful Izzuan, 2019. "A robust and efficient estimator for the tail index of inverse Pareto distribution," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 517(C), pages 431-439.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    CO2 emission; Pareto; Size distribution; Zipf's law;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C13 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods and Methodology: General - - - Estimation: General
    • C46 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods: Special Topics - - - Specific Distributions
    • Q54 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Climate; Natural Disasters and their Management; Global Warming

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:eneeco:v:66:y:2017:i:c:p:182-193. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/eneco .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.