Economic Benefits and Environmental Costs in Exports of China's Manufacturing of Electrical and Optical Equipment

Based on the World Input-Output Database（WIOD） 1995—2009 Input-Output Table and Energy Account Data，this paper uses the gross export eecomposition framework proposed by Koopman et al. to get the value added in export and input-output analysis to calculate CO2 embodied in export. chooses the domestic value added and CO2 emission embodied in exports as indicators to measure the economic benefits and environmental costs of the optical and electrical equipment sector's export，and construts the index of CO2 emission per value added to measure the environmental costs of the unit economic benefits. We also select the United States to compare with China. Then，we decompose the value added per CO2 emission gap between China and the United States. The results show that the domestic value added in exports of China's optical and electrical equipment sector have generally increased. The economic benefits of the export of this sector in the United States fluctuate slightly rise. The domestic embodied CO2 emission in the sector exports of China rose slightly in the fluctuation of “decline-increase-decline”. The domestic embodied CO2 emission in the sector exports of the United States shows a downward trend. To further study the index of value added per CO2 emission，both two countries have shown a downward trend，but China's is still higher than that of the United States. The index gaps between the two countries dropped during the 1995—2009. The decomposition result shows that this gap is mainly caused by the carbon emission coefficient effect，the value added coefficient and the input-output structure effect. And the latter two terms have a greater driving effect after 2005 especially.