There is a broader international movement towards using better tracking of product life cycle emissions:

https://www.unep.org/explore-topics/resource-efficiency/what...

Such data, when generally available, will give us a better picture of the overall global situation.

> Just stating dollar based household consumption values seems like a very poor proxy though

I think it is, actually. Western citizens and US citizens in particular does not only have a much higher expenditure of consumer goods, the goods they prefer have higher emissions connected to them also.

Here is a report from 2015 about Germany's average household emissions:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276831049_Regional_...

"Households are either directly or indirectly responsible for the highest share of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions."

The national average was found to be about 15 tons CO2 per capita per year.

Here is a report with data from 2015 regarding China's average household emissions:

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/18/4919/pdf

The national average was ~1.5 tons CO2 per capita per year.

The following article claims 1.7 tons per capita. https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3165

Here we can see that China's total household emissions were about 1/10'th of that of Germany in 2015.

The following article compares China’s household emissions compared to UK and Canada

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22114...

“In the years when HCEs were first reported (1995 in China, 1990 in Canada and 1997 in UK), per person HCEs in China, Canada and the UK were 0.54 tCO2, 13.54 tCO2 and 9.63 tCO2, respectively. These values had changed to 1.77 tCO2, 13.14 tCO2, 8.20 tCO2 by the end of reporting (2011 in China and UK and 2007 in Canada),”

As you can see, such analyses paints a very different picture, one where western households appears to be the main driver of global emissions. And thus the focus on production based emissions is largely a red herring, due to the fact that China has to catch up in infrastructure. The emissions tied to western infrastructure have already been emitted.

In essence, China has become the scapegoat of the guilty conscience of the west, who will twist the data in such a way to paint themselves in the most flattering light they can, and China in the worst possible way.

> It assumes that all the benefits of the CO2 emissions accumulate with the country consuming the goods, not the country producing the goods.

All countries have a responsibility for decreasing emissions tied to the production of goods, but all goods are essentially produced for the global market and as such is driven by global demand. Hence consumption is the most important measure when delivering blame. Moreover, if hypothetically western Europe had been forced to produce the goods that China produces (per capita) and vice versa, the emissions tied to European production would rapidly increase, and the production of them would naturally become much dirtier as well due to the limited amount of green energy and cheapness of dirty sources of electricity. So delivering the blame on countries for the production of goods assumes the impossible alternative scenario where the west hypothetically could do a lot better in terms of production. It’s not clear that they could.