international trade of scarce water abstract recent analyses of the evolution and structure of trade in virtual water revealed that the number of trade connections and volume of virtual water trade have more than doubled over the past two decades and that developed countries increasingly import water embodied in goods from the rest of the world to alleviate pressure on domestic water resources at the same time as demand continues to increase and climate change threatens to alter hydrological cycles water scarcity is a growing problem does research into virtual water trade need to consider water scarcity and differentiate flows out of water scarce regions from flows out of water abundant regions previous studies sum and compare virtual water volumes originating in countries experiencing vastly different degrees of water scarcity we therefore incorporate water scarcity into an assessment of global virtual water flows we use input output analysis to include indirect virtual water flows we find that the structure of global virtual water networks changes significantly after adjusting for water scarcity

technology international trade and pollution from us manufacturing pollution emitted by us manufacturers declined markedly over the past several decades even as real manufacturing output increased i first show that most of the decline in us manufacturing pollution has resulted from changing production processes technology rather than changes in the mix of goods produced i then show that increased net imports of polluting goods international trade accounts for only a small portion of the pollution reductions from the changing mix of goods together these two findings demonstrate that shifting polluting industries overseas explains only a minor part less than 10 percent of the cleanup of us manufacturing jel f18 l23 l60 o30 q52 q53

contribution of demand shifts to industrial so 2 emissions in a transition economy evidence from china abstract for the past 20 years sulfur dioxide so2 emissions control has been a goal in china whose economy has been characterized as fast growing and in enormous transition as a prerequisite for effective future so2 emissions control a detailed investigation is needed to uncover and assess the contributions to changes in so2 emissions of key underlying drivers associated with china s evolving demand structure using structural decomposition analysis sda considering industrial characteristics and sector interactions this study identifies the underlying drivers behind china s demand structure shifts as well as their contributions to changes in industrial so2 emissions the results show that the change in total final demand was the largest driver of the increase in so2 emissions resulting in an increase of 36 64 million tons mt so2 emissions during the time period 1997 to 2012 from the final demand perspective the change in capital formation was the largest contributor resulting in an increase of 16 78 mt so2 emissions and accounting for 45 of the increase due to final demand shifts the construction industry was the primary trigger of industrial so2 emissions growth caused by shifts in final demand with an induced amount impact on other industries of so2 emissions of 10 14 mt the key drivers capturing shifts in final demand were mainly capital formation in the construction industry capital formation and exports in technology intensive industries and consumption in the services industries the recommendation is that to control industrial so2 emissions china should depend first on its economic transition that includes technology improvements and industry structure optimization for both final demand and production

stature and the standard of living research on the standard of living now emphasizes alternatives or supplements to the national income accounts this paper reviews the results of two decades of research using stature as a measure of health aspects of human welfare after comparing and contrasting stature with per capita income i consider height patterns discovered by economic historians that challenge traditional beliefs about the past including long term trends cycles in heights and the dreadfully small stature of slave children that was followed by catch up growth the paper concludes with comparisons to work in development economics and suggestions for research

value added content of trade a comprehensive approach abstract this letter provides an approach to decompose the value added content of trade into foreign and domestic components when intermediates are traded the measure adds to the existing literature by considering both exports and imports simultaneously in this way this approach generalizes the commonly applied vertical specialization measures based on exports only which are encompassed

index decomposition analysis applied to co2 emission studies index decomposition analysis ida was first extended from energy consumption to energy related co2 emission studies in 1991 since then many studies have been reported covering various countries and emission sectors however unlike the case of energy consumption studies a comprehensive literature survey that focuses specifically on emission studies has so far not been reported in this paper we attempt to fill this gap by reviewing 80 papers appearing in peer reviewed journals from 1991 to 2012 in this application area the first part of this paper deals with the developments with regard to the ida approaches used by researchers and the scope and focus of their studies in the second part the empirical results reported in the surveyed studies are analyzed consolidated and presented by emission sector the objective is to reveal the relative contributions of key effects on changes in the aggregate carbon intensity and this is done by emission sector and by country the findings of both parts are useful in understanding the development of ida in the application area of emission study as well as the key drivers of aggregate carbon intensities in the past and their possible future developments

measuring the distribution of material well being u s trends abstract economists with a few exceptions have automatically assumed that the important measure of well being is income in contrast economic historians have broadened the measure of well being with particular interest in mortality morbidity nutrition education and leisure when one takes this broader view of the standard of living there appears to be a strong trend toward more equality in the distribution of well being since the industrial revolution gini coefficients calculated for the distributions of lifespan and educational attainment have declined dramatically since the mid nineteenth century for the united states mortality and educational differentials have also declined inequality of leisure time and consumption though not as consistently measured also show trends toward equality over the twentieth century these trends toward equality in well being as measured by indicators other than income and wealth seem to be generated by provision of public goods natural boundaries to lifespan educational attainment and leisure and by the growth in mean per capita income the divergent trends in the distributions of income and the other measures of well being caution against reliance on the distribution of income to interpret trends in inequality

a structural decomposition analysis of the emissions embodied in trade abstract the aim of this study is to quantify the driving forces behind the growth of carbon dioxide emissions embodied in trade eet the world input output database is used to estimate eet in 40 countries during 1995 2007 after which a structural decomposition analysis is applied to avoid biases in the results we have used the input output tables in previous year s prices and chained the outcomes in many developed countries the growth of emissions embodied in imports is much higher than the growth of emissions embodied in exports a key reason for this finding is the change in the structure of trade both in intermediate and in final products emerging economies like the bric countries have increased their share in production and trade at the expense of developed countries producers and consumers in developed countries have shifted towards importing a larger share of products from emerging countries this is the distinguishing feature that led to an increase of emissions embodied in imports for developed countries and an increase of emissions embodied in exports for emerging countries these results suggest policy makers to monitor eet more carefully and take the effects of trade on emissions into consideration

will economic restructuring in china reduce trade embodied co2 emissions we acknowledge the support of the national social science foundation of china project no project no 09 zd029 and the institute for energy environment and economy at tsinghua university which is supporting tianyu qi s doctoral research as a visiting scholar at the massachusetts institute of technology we further acknowledge the support of eni s p a icf international and shell international ltd initial sponsors of the china energy and climate project in the mit joint program on the science and policy of global change at mit none of the sponsoring organizations played a role in the study design collection analysis or interpretation of the data used for this study nor did they influence our decisions to submit the article for publication and all errors are our own we also acknowledge general industrial and government sponsors of the joint program on the science and policy of global change http globalchange mit edu sponsors all

what accounts for the growth of carbon dioxide emissions in advanced and emerging economies the role of consumption technology and global supply chain participation abstract this paper examines the driving forces behind the growth in carbon dioxide emissions in forty advanced and emerging economies between 1995 and 2008 we use the global supply chain concept introduced in timmer et al 2014 to measure co2 emissions in internationally fragmented production networks and embed the concept in structural decomposition analysis our findings suggest that rising levels of domestic consumption are related to increased carbon dioxide emissions in both advanced and emerging economies a substantial share of co2 emissions growth in emerging economies is accounted for by increased participation in global supply chains however even for countries that rapidly integrated in global production networks such as china rising domestic consumption accounts for the majority of territorial emissions

income inequality in the united states 1913 1998 this paper presents new homogeneous series on top shares of income and wages from 1913 to 1998 in the united states using individual tax returns data top income and wages shares display a u shaped pattern over the century our series suggest that the large shocks that capital owners experienced during the great depression and world war ii have had a permanent effect on top capital incomes we argue that steep progressive income and estate taxation may have prevented large fortunes from fully recovering from these shocks top wage shares were flat before world war ii dropped precipitously during the war and did not start to recover before the late 1960s but are now higher than before world war ii as a result the working rich have replaced the rentiers at the top of the income distribution

changes of co2 emissions embodied in china japan trade drivers and implications co2 emission embodied in trade is an important aspect to respond international carbon mitigation half of china s emission increase was due to production of exports in order to analyze the reason of such a rapid emission increase embodied co2 emission flows between china and japan for the period of 2000 2009 were estimated in this study by using emission embodied in bilateral trade eebt approach in order to raise policy implications for both countries from trade perspective decomposition analysis was further conducted in order to identify driving forces underlying changes during the study period moreover the concept of dependence on traded co2 was proposed for analyzing mutual dependence of china and japan s carbon emission and economy the results show that china was a net exporter of embodied co2 emissions between china and japan trade but both china s exported emissions and net emission transfer to japan began to decrease after 2007 more emissions were embodied in more advanced and less carbon intensive products especially for china s exports driving force analysis shows that trade volume was the main driver for the increase of embodied emissions and technology effect contributed mainly to the decrease the absolute value of technology effect was even larger than activity effect in some years this study also reveals that japan was relatively more dependent on china s co2 emissions and showed an increasing trend over the last decade while china s economic development was more dependent on imports from japan and such a situation reversed after 2006 this study suggests that china should further reduce its emission intensity for narrowing the gap of embodied emissions between the bilateral trade flows and japanese energy saving technologies should be transferred to china

input output analysis of co2 emissions embodied in trade and the driving forces processing and normal exports in recent years energy related co2 emissions embodied in international trade and the driving forces have been widely studied by researchers using the environmental input output framework most previous studies however do not differentiate different input structures in manufacturing processing exports and normal exports using china as an example this paper exemplifies how implications of results obtained using different export assumptions differ the study posits that the utilization of traditional i o model results in an overestimation of emissions embodied in processing exports and an underestimation in normal exports the estimate of co2 emissions embodied in china s exports drops by 32 when the extended i o model is used the choice of export assumption has more impact on the decomposition results for processing exports the study further highlights that for a country with an export structure similar to china it is meaningful to look into the impact of export assumption in embodied emission studies

a multi region structural decomposition analysis of global co2 emission intensity abstract this paper studies changes in global and national co 2 emission intensities using the multi region structural decomposition analysis sda technique emission intensities such as the ratio of co 2 emissions to gdp have lately been widely used to characterize national emission performance meanwhile the impact of international trade has been found to be important in global emission accounting it is therefore important to analyze changes in emission intensities by taking trade into consideration in this study we first propose two sda models one at the global level and the other at the country level to quantify both the domestic and trade related effects on an intensity indicator the models are then used to study changes in global and countries co 2 emission intensities from 2000 to 2009 the results show that sectoral emission efficiency improvement was the main contributor to the slight decrease in global emission intensity during the period while international trade marginally hampered improvement of global emission intensity comparisons of the performance between emerging economies and advanced economies reveal the importance of production structure and final demand structure in emission intensity reduction the policy implications of the findings are presented

recent trends in the size distribution of household wealth based on the survey of consumer finances the distribution of wealth in the united states became much more unequal in the 1980s and that trend continued albeit at a slower pace in the 1990s the only households that saw their mean net worth rise in absolute terms between 1983 and 1995 were those in the top 20 percent and the gains were particularly strong for the top one percent all other groups were particularly strong for the top one percent all other groups suffered real wealth losses including the median household and declines were particularly precipitous at the bottom racial disparities widened and young households also lost out over this period

the economics of schooling production and efficiency in public schools n recent years public and professional interest in schools has been heightened by a spate of reports many of them critical of current school policy these policy documents have added to persistent and long standing concerns about the cost effectiveness and fairness of the current school structure and have made schooling once again a serious public issue as in the past however any renewed interest in education is likely to be short lived doomed to dissipate as frustration over the inability of policy to improve school practice sets in this frustration about school policy relates directly to knowledge about the educational production process and in turn to underlying research on schools although the educational process has been extensively researched clear policy prescriptions flowing from this research have been difficult to derive 2 there exists however a consistency to the research findings that does have an immediate application to school policy schools differ dramatically in quality

economic gains and environmental losses from international trade a decomposition of pollution intensity in china s value added trade abstract based on a multi regional input output model this study explores the temporal changes and driving forces of china s environmental losses relative to its economic gains from international trade with each of its 45 trading partners from 1995 to 2015 we find that china suffered larger environment losses per us value added through exports than almost all of its trading partners over time the environmental losses paid by china declined quicker than that of its bilateral trading partners the decomposition results of our research further show that the technology effect played a dominant role in this decline moreover the phenomenon that developed economies have outsourced dirty intermediate production stages to emerging economies via trade in intermediate goods has led to the emerging economies suffering greater environmental losses over time for certain economic gains from international trade

upgrading or downgrading china s regional carbon emission intensity evolution and its determinants one of china s major national targets is to environmentally upgrade its economy in this paper we define environmental upgrading as lowering the carbon intensity the disparities among china s regions suggest to examine china s carbon emission performance at the regional level for this purpose we use inter regional input output tables for 2002 2007 and 2012 that distinguish processing exports from ordinary exports the regional emission intensities eis show environmental downgrading in the period 2002 2007 and upgrading during 2007 2012 to identify the determinants of the evolution of regional eis we have employed a multiplicative structural decomposition analysis changes in direct emission coefficients and changes in production technology are found to be the major determinants however next to these standard determinants we also evaluate the effects on the changes in regional eis of changes in inter regional trade and changes in inter regional spillovers changing inter regional trade is found to have increased the ei significantly in western and central regions this suggests that more dirty production was shifted from coastal to inland regions our study yields clear policy recommendations for achieving china s transformation to a low carbon economy c 2020 elsevier b v all rights reserved

sources and flows of china s virtual so 2 emission transfers embodied in interprovincial trade a multiregional input output analysis abstract china faces immense difficulties caused by its domestic regional air pollution caused by atmospheric diffusion of pollutants across administrative boundaries because of the closer interregional economic connections that have formed in this study we focus on the virtual flows of pollutants embodied in interprovincial trade we compared two methods embodied emissions in bilateral trade eebt and the multiregional input output mrio model to determine emission flows for 2002 and 2007 and found that the results between these two approaches differed significantly particularly for the year 2007 this indicates that the choice of the accounting method has obvious impacts on subsequent decisions further analysis based on the mrio method which captures the complete interregional supply chains and is more applicable to consumption based studies showed that the embodied so 2 emissions in interprovincial trade accounted for 27 58 of the total so 2 emissions in china in 2002 and 35 25 in 2007 inner mongolia shanxi and guizhou were the major embodied emission exporting regions with sources mainly from the electricity nonmetal mineral production chemicals and metal smelting sectors the exported emissions mainly ended up in rich provinces including beijing tianjin shanghai and guangdong due to those provinces final demands for products of the construction food production and transport equipment manufacturing sectors furthermore rich provinces were net importers in interprovincial trade with a pollution terms of trade value less than one the results yield important implications for china s air pollution controls emission reduction tasks should be reasonably distributed among provinces to prevent developed provinces from outsourcing more pollution emissions to less developed provinces through interprovincial trade regulation of consumption in developed provinces would help to control national pollution financial and technical support for pollution control should favor the less developed regions

does ecologically unequal exchange occur the hypothesis of ecologically unequal exchange posits that low and middle income developing nations maintain an ecological deficit with wealthy developed nations exporting natural resources and high impact commodities thereby allowing wealthy economies to avoid operating ecologically impactful industries at home in this survey we assess the footprint of consumption of 187 countries using eight indicators of environmental pressure in order to determine whether or not this phenomenon occurs we use input output analysis with a new high resolution global multi region input output table to calculate each trading pair s balance of trade in biophysical terms of ghg emissions embodied water and scarcity weighted water content air pollution threatened species human appropriated net primary productivity total material flow and ecological footprint we test three hypotheses that should be true if ecologically unequal exchange occurs one the inter regional balance of trade in biophysical terms is disproportional to the balance of trade in financial terms we find this is true though not strongly so two exports from developing nations are more ecologically intensive than those from developed nations we find this is true three high income nations disproportionately exert ecological impacts in lower income nations we find this is false high income nations are mostly exporters not importers of biophysical resources

co2 emissions per value added in exports of china a comparison with usa based on generalized logarithmic mean divisia index decomposition abstract this study first analyzes co 2 emissions per value added epv in exports of china during 1995 2009 and compares it with that of usa second a generalized logarithmic mean divisia index glmdi method is proposed to decompose the epv gaps between china and usa into five effects this method generalizes existing lmdi methods and makes the multiplicative decomposition of a sum of several terms possible then attribution analysis on value added coefficient effect is conducted results show that aggregate epv of china s exports is 4 20 mt billion us dollars in 1995 which decreases to 2 48 in 2009 for usa it is 0 66 0 33 respectively epv of china s exports is several times greater than that of usa at sectoral level industrial sectors and transport sectors are top sectors with large epv in china s exports which corresponds to the case of usa epv gaps of the service sectors between china and usa have become increasingly prominent since 2000 decomposition results show that emission coefficients value added coefficients and input output structure are the main driving factors of the expanding epv gaps between china and usa attribution analysis on value added coefficient effect the fastest growing effect shows that electrical and optical sector has been the largest contributor to epv gaps between china and usa resulting from value added coefficient effect since 1998 and its effect sharply increases during 1995 2009 policy implications derived are finally discussed

input output analysis of co2 emissions embodied in trade the effects of sector aggregation abstract energy related co2 emissions embodied in international trade have been widely studied by researchers using the environmental input output analysis framework it is well known that both sector aggregation and spatial aggregation affect the results obtained in such studies with regard to the latter past studies are often conducted at the national level irrespective of country or economy size for a large economy with the needed data studies may be conducted at different levels of spatial aggregation we examine this problem analytically by extending the work of su et al su b huang h c ang b w zhou p 2010 input output analysis of co2 emissions embodied in trade the effects of sector aggregation energy economics 32 1 166 175 on sector aggregation we present a numerical example using the data of china and by dividing the country into eight regions it is found that the results are highly dependent on spatial aggregation our study shows that for a large country like china it is meaningful to look into the effect of spatial aggregation

china s foreign trade and climate change a case study of co2 emissions abstract the globalization of trade has numerous environmental implications trade creates a mechanism for consumers to shift environmental pollution associated with their consumption to other countries carbon leakage exerts great influences on international trade and economy applying an input output approach the paper estimates the amount of carbon dioxide co2 embodied in china s foreign trade during 1997 2007 it is found that 10 03 26 54 of china s annual co2 emissions are produced during the manufacture of export goods destined for foreign consumers while the co2 emissions embodied in china s imports accounted for only 4 40 1997 and 9 05 2007 of that we also estimate that the rest of world avoided emitting 150 18 mt co2 in 1997 increasing to 593 mt in 2007 as a result of importing goods from china rather than manufacturing the same type and quantity of goods domestically during 1997 2007 the net additional global co2 emissions resulting from china s exports were 4894 mt then the paper divides the trade embodied emissions into scale composition and technical effect it was found that scale and composition effect increased the co2 emissions embodied in trade while the technical effect offset a small part of them finally its mechanism and policy implications are presented

multiplicative structural decomposition analysis of aggregate embodied energy and emission intensities abstract aggregate intensity indicators such as the ratio of a country s energy and emissions to its gdp are often used by researchers and policymakers to study energy and environmental performance this paper analyzes the relationship between energy or emissions and value added or gdp from a different viewpoint namely from the demand rather than the production perspective using the input output i o framework the aggregate embodied intensity aei defined as the ratio of embodied energy or emissions to embodied value added can be defined at the aggregate final demand category and sectoral levels the total aggregate intensity can be presented as a weighted sum of the aeis at the final demand category or sectoral level changes of the aei at different levels can be decomposed to identify the driving forces using multiplicative sda a study using the latest 2007 and 2012 datasets of china indicates that a its aggregate intensity of co 2 emissions was mainly determined by the aei in investment and b the emission intensity effect generally contributed the most to the aei ratio changes at different levels the proposed framework can be applied to other aggregate intensity indicators and extended to multi country region analysis

temporal change of china s pollution terms of trade and its determinants abstract based on the world input output database wiod this study employed a revised pollution terms of trade ptt indicator to investigate the temporal change of china s environmental cost relative to its economic gains from international trade from 1995 to 2009 the results show that china has ptt larger than 1 indicating that china emits more emissions to obtain each unit of value added from exports than its trade partners over the period china s ptt first decreased from 1995 to 2001 and then increased from 2001 to 2009 the further decompositions show that improving technology is the leading driving force to decrease ptt while the change in global trade pattern is the leading force increasing ptt especially after 2001 we further decomposed the temporal change of china s ptt by income group of the trading partners the results show that the change in the global trade pattern is the crucial driving force behind the different changes of ptt by income group

lmdi decomposition approach a guide for implementation since it was first used by researchers to analyze industrial electricity consumption in the early 1980s index decomposition analysis ida has been widely adopted in energy and emission studies lately its use as the analytical component of accounting frameworks for tracking economy wide energy efficiency trends has attracted considerable attention and interest among policy makers the last comprehensive literature review of ida was reported in 2000 which is some years back after giving an update and presenting the key trends in the last 15 years this study focuses on the implementation issues of the logarithmic mean divisia index lmdi decomposition methods in view of their dominance in ida in recent years eight lmdi models are presented and their origin decomposition formulae and strengths and weaknesses are summarized guidelines on the choice among these models are provided to assist users in implementation

driving factors of carbon emissions embodied in china us trade a structural decomposition analysis abstract based on the environmental multi regional input output model this study employed structural decomposition analysis to investigate the driving factors of carbon emissions embodied in china us trade over the period of 1995 2009 effective driving factors were classified into six groups and each group included both factors at home and abroad the results show that factors trade structure of intermediate products at home and export market shares of final products at home presented the largest positive impacts to increments in carbon emissions embodied in chinese exports to the us while the majority of negative impacts was generated by changes in energy intensities at home the increment in carbon emissions embodied in us exports to china was mostly contributed by total demands abroad impacts of other driving factors were much smaller at the sectoral level both positive and negative impacts of driving factors were largely limited to a few sectors e g textiles products machinery transport equipment and electrical equipment here positive impacts were mostly contributed by export market shares of final products at home and total demands abroad and negative impacts were mainly contributed by energy intensities at home policy implications deduced from the results were discussed

reexamine so2 emissions embodied in china s exports using multiregional input output analysis previous studies on embodied emission in china s exports focus on the national aggregate analysis while pay little attention to the interregional emission transfer driven by exports we used multiregional input output model of 30 provinces to reexamine the embodied emissions and to capture the interregional linkage in it results in 2002 2007 show that so2 embodied in exports contributes 15 17 22 08 of the total domestic so2 emissions and 74 40 78 14 of the embodiment is in exports from the eastern provinces where over 90 of china s exports occur however only about 70 of the embodied emission in eastern china s exports is discharged in the east an increasing portion 24 to 34 is released in the central and western provinces as a result of interregional production linkage moreover the interregional connection becomes closer during the 2002 2007 period which increases the scale and intensity of embodied emission in china s export given large gaps in emission intensity among regions further analysis on guangdong china s largest export province shows that the so2 emissions per unit of output induced by guangdong s exports are larger than that induced by the province s own exports for most provinces especially the central and western provinces which are restricted in exports and indirectly export by supporting guangdong s exports via interregional economic linkage the results yield important implications for china s export and pollution emission control policy