A Study On China’s Provincial Carbon Dioxide Emission Performance Measurement

Green House Gases reduction and low carbon economy development have been the focus globally as the environment is increasingly worse, and China, the largest economy and the developing country with the most carbon dioxide emission, is facing both international and domestic pressure. China’s development is in the significant period, and improving carbon dioxide emission performance is the key to bring the economy development and carbon dioxide emission to the perfect state, meanwhile the provincial carbon dioxide emission reduction is the start to the country carbon reduction target, so the measurement on the provincial carbon dioxide emission performance and reduction target is significant for the policy maker.This thesis calculated the carbon dioxide emission in Chinese provinces from 1997 to 2012, and analyzed the change trend from view of carbon dioxide emission, per capita carbon dioxide emissions and carbon dioxide emission intensity; then considering the overestimate shortcomings of traditional directional distance function calculating the carbon dioxide emission performance, both the traditional directional distance function and scale directional distance were used to calculate the carbon dioxide emission performance and the results were compared, and the scale direction, target value and change has been calculated, on which the reduction potential was measured.The results shown that the total carbon dioxide emission of China increased urgently from 2002,and the increase rate has decreased from 2008 to 2012, but China still has to face the huge pressure of carbon dioxide emission reduction; the regional differences of total carbon dioxide emission, carbon dioxide intensity and per capita carbon dioxide emissions in Chinese provinces were distinguished and the middle and western parts should change the economy development pattern and improve the carbon dioxide emission performance; the carbon dioxide emission performance results with scale directional distance function were more subjective and proper; the carbon dioxide performance of the coastal areas and eastern region in China was better than other regions, and the carbon dioxide emissions reduction changes of the provinces whose carbon dioxide emission performance didn’t reach the production frontier were larger than the GDP increase changes, and in order to improve the performance the provinces should try to reduce the carbon dioxide emission.