Carbon Emissions Embodied in Foreign Trade of China: An Investigation based on Global Vertical Specialization

Nowadays, vertical specialization is the important feature of international trade. With the development of economic globalization, degree of vertical specialization among countries is gradually increasing. Under this background, by improving the calculating model of carbon embodied in trade, this paper calculates carbon emission embodied in foreign trade of China during 1995—2009 by using global I-O tables in constant price. It takes the differences of production technology among countries into consideration, using carbon intensity in different county to calculate carbon embodied in import to make results more accurate. Results show that from 1995—2009, the tendency that China participated in vertical specialization strengthened and China produced export good with large amount of CO2 emissions. Carbon embodied in foreign trade of China increased on the whole, and the amount of CO2 in exports increased from 502.12Mt in 1995 to 2398.96Mt; CO2 in imports increased from 141.14Mt in 1995 to 1423.7Mt. Textile and optical and electronic sectors were main net exporters of CO2. Mining and construction sectors were net importer of CO2.There were two aspects of imbalance of CO2 embodied in trade. On the one hand, China was the net exporter of CO2; on the other hand, the percentage of carbon embodied in the total amount of carbon in export was much higher than that of the value-added in export.