Research On The Measurement Of Embodied Carbon And Its Influencing Factors In Sino-Germany Trade

Recently, the 21 st United Nations Climate Conference signed the Paris Agreement which restrict the global warming rate within 1.5 degrees, which requires all countries to save the energy and reduce the emissions.China is a country with enormous carbon emissions and should pay more attention on carbon reduction. With the deepening of bilateral between China and Germany, Germany has become the world’s second largest trading partner after the United States of China, exceeding Japan. In order to cut down the embodied carbon emissions and develop the low-carbon economy, it is essential to measure the carbon emissions within the Sino-Germany trade and analyze the influencing factors og it.Firstly, this paper presents the literature review of carbon embodied in trade while it decides the input-output methods as the main researching method.And then it introduces the development process of Sino-Germany trade and the change of its trade structure. After that, based on the German input-output table, import and export data, carbon emission amount and the price index data,with considering the technical heterogeneity and price fluctuation, it measures the carbon embodied in the Sino-German trade from 1995 to 2009. The amount of carbon emissions and the trade volume wthin Sino-Germany trade both show a rising trend. But the carbon embodied in China’s exporting trade to Germany is significantly higher than that of importing trade,which implies that China is a net exporter of carbon in the bilateral trade between Germany and China. Moreover, the embodied carbon is mainly in those "double high" sectors like electrical and optical equipment which are with high exporting number and high carbon emission intensity.Next,it uses the structural decomposition analysis model to decompose the influence factors of the embodied carbon into the technical effect, structural effect and scale effect. The results show that the scale effect is the most significant factor in the process of import and export trade, and the effect of technology can significantly restrain the growth of carbon, but can not counteract the positive effect of scale effect. Finally, according to the results of the analysis, the paper puts forward some suggestions on the reduction of the embodied carbon in the Sino-Germany trade.