An Empirical Study On The Influencing Factors Of Carbon Emissions In Electricity Sector

The climate is getting warmer all over the world, and extreme weather continues to occur. Under this circumstance, countries are putting forward emission reduction targets one after another. As the biggest carbon emission country in the world, China is faced with great pressure on reducing emissions.By studying the history and present situation of carbon emission, production and consumption in electricity sector, we found that economic development, industrial structure, population structure, urbanization, energy mix and technology are the main influencing factors of the carbon emissions in electricity sector. We did empirical study with the data of 136 economies around the world throughout the whole period 1971-2011 for the factors mentioned above, and found that except technology reduce carbon emissions in electricity sector, the other factors can raise carbon emissions in electricity sector. We also paid special attention to the relationship between GDP and carbon emissions in electricity sector. In this thesis,7 different combination of piecewise linear regression models are estimated in the case of 15 segments.The estimation results show that economic development is the most important influencing factor among those 6 factors that economic development, industrial structure, population structure, urbanization, energy mix and technology. Every percentage increase in the value of per capita GDP, the carbon emissions in electricity sector increase by 1.01 percentages. When the income is in the lower level, carbon emissions raise with the increase of GDP, but when the per capita GDP reaches 25 thousand dollars, the carbon emissions increase slower. We didn’t find clear evidence of an "inverse U" relation between per-capita carbon emissions in electricity sector and per-capita GDP in this thesis.