How Does Energy Consumption and Economic Development Affect Carbon Emissions? A Multi-Process Decomposition Framework

Against the background that climate warming has become a global challenge, exploring the factors that drive carbon emissions change is important to achieve emission reduction targets. Because of the differences in economic development, resource endowment, and historical accumulation, different countries generally have significant technological heterogeneity in the carbon generation process. Therefore, the heterogeneity-related factors should also be understood, which can help policy making and responsibility attribution more accurate. As such, this study developed a meta-frontier-based production–theoretical decomposition analysis method to track the progress of carbon emission change in 42 countries during 2012–2019 with production heterogeneity between the countries taken into account. The empirical study draws the following three meaningful conclusions: firstly, the carbon emission process of different countries has clear technological heterogeneity, mainly reflected in aspects of their energy-use efficiency and energy-use technology. Secondly, the decomposition analysis results showed that the potential energy intensity effect and the economic activity effect played the dominant role in driving and reducing carbon emissions, respectively. Additionally, this conclusion is right for all types of countries. Thirdly, the attribution analysis showed that different types of countries have significantly different contributions to the influencing factors of carbon emission changes, among which countries with large energy consumption and large economies need to take more responsibility for emission reduction.