Embodied CO₂ Emission And Efficiency In Service Sector Of China’s Provinces

Since the beginning of 21st century,China’s economy has entered a period of rapid development,but it’s industrial structure and production process still retain the characteristics of traditional extensive economy,which results in a more serious situation of environmental pollution.As the largest developing country in the world,China’s government is facing a long-term and arduous challenge to reduce CO₂ emission and raise carbon efficiency.The tertiary industry has always been regarded as the key in the implementation of industry restructuring or energy conservation and emission reduction by its cleaner production process.However,from the perspective of embodied carbon,the supply chain of service sector may indirectly drive considerable upstream CO₂ emission in non-service sectors,and lead to the actual CO₂ emission be underestimated.Besides,the crucial factors affecting CO₂ emission are different due to the significant gap among regional economy and industrial structure.Therefore it becomes imperative to evaluate CO₂ efficiency of provincial service sectors accurately,in order to make effective emission reduction targets with the characteristics of regional development.This paper use SRIO model to calculate embodied CO₂ emission of service sector in30 provinces,and compared differences between two methods firstly.And then evaluated the embodied CO₂ efficiency through three-stage DEA.The results show that in the previous studies,the actual CO₂ emission of service sector has been greatly underestimated.Its growth trend is continuing,while the carbon intensity becomes smaller year by year.The embodied CO₂ efficiency of 30 provinces have obvious different,of which the eastern coastal area has the highest level of efficiency,but the western has the lowest one.These three regions also have different driving factors:For the provinces in eastern area,they could improve the carbon efficiency by expanding the scale of production,but for the other provinces,they may enhance the production technology primarily.Based on the above conclusions,this paper believes that the key to achieve the targets of energy-saving and emission-reduction is improving technology,optimizing the sector-structure in the tertiary industry,motivating market-oriented economy,and balance the regional development.