Assessing CO2 emissions in China's commercial sector: Determinants and reduction strategies

The commercial sector is one of the key sectors in China's economic transformation and carbon emissions control. This paper applies VAR and STIRPAT models to investigate the major influencing factors of CO2 emissions in China's commercial sector over the period 1980-2014. According to the empirical results, per capita GDP, urbanization and energy structure have positive effects on CO2 emissions while energy intensity has negative effect on CO2 emissions in the long term. Besides, per capita GDP ranks as the most important driving factors of CO2 in China's commercial sector, followed by urbanization, energy structure and energy intensity in that order. This paper argues that reducing energy intensity and improving energy structure are the means to realize CO2 emission reductions in the commercial sector in the short and long term, respectively. Besides, this paper forecasts that CO2 emissions in China's commercial sector will be 1942 Mt by 2030, which is huge and about half of the CO2 emissions of the European Union in 2014. The findings have important implications for policy-makers to enact CO2 emission reduction policies. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.