the main factors explaining changes in carbon footprints and inequalities for low- and middleincome countries. First-time purchasers of carbon-intensive goods will have important implications for macro-level trends in energy use (Gertler et al., 2016). For instance, vehicle ownership in urban China has risen at almost 40 percent per year between 2000 and 2010, helping fuel China’s rapid growth in oil consumption (National Bureau of Statistics 2001, 2011).<sup>1</sup> The projections are based on the relationship between vehicle ownership and utilization that is backwards looking and do not account for future changes in the emissions intensity of transportation (electric vehicles and improved efficiency of combustion engines). While such effects will have large impacts in higher-income countries, they will remain smaller in low-income countries.<sup>2</sup> The simulations are done in three steps. First, we use our previous analysis to simulate how changes in income will affect car ownership and use. For our LSMS sample of 18 countries, we find that, on average, car ownership will almost double and vehicle use increase by more than 57% as incomes reach their 2035 levels. Second, we use additional data to simulate how change in car ownership and use affect carbon footprints. By 2035, we find that transport carbon emissions will increase on average by 52% in the 18 countries from our LSMS sample. Given that this effect is not linear across the income distribution, we complement our results by decomposing carbon emissions across expenditure quintiles. We show that the distribution of emissions across income groups is highly concentrated among the richest households. By 2035, carbon emissions concentration increases about twice as much for the bottom 80% than the top 20%. Within-country carbon inequality is expected to slightly decrease for the whole sample of countries, increase in some countries, but decrease in others. However, the top 20% will remain by far the main contributor to carbon emissions.

**Literature review** This paper is related to several strands of literature. It first complements the many studies that have analyzed the determinants of household transport expenditures. Most papers have focused their research on the impacts of change in fuel prices and on transport mobility for poor households (Ferdous et al., 2010). This literature can be classified into three categories: (i) works that describe the trend and composition of household transport spending (see e.g., Kauppila, 2011; Venter, 2011; Nie et al., 2016; Anowar et al., 2018), (ii) works that investigate the determinants of transport demand (see e.g., Gandelman et al., 2019), and (iii) works that analyze household transport spending jointly with other types of expenditures (see e.g., Choo et al., 2007). Most studies show that overall, the share of household transport expenditure over total expenditure varies from 10% to 20%, and that private transport spending represents the main component of transport expenditures with a share up to 80% in Australia or 85% in Canada. Furthermore, there are significant differences in transport shares between rich and poor households in low- and middle-income countries, especially in Africa (see e.g., Olvera

> 1More detailed mobility surveys would be needed to look at the environmental impacts of rising income on the substitution between public transport services and private transport.

> 2More work would need to be done to assess the size of the reduction in emissions intensity of transportation in low- and middle-income countries to improve the simulations.

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