Heterogeneous impacts of households on carbon dioxide emissions in Chinese provinces

As unequal carbon dioxide emissions exist among households with diverse consumption patterns resulting from different income and spatial contexts, the same carbon emission reduction policies for households will go against the principle of social equality. Though a lot of attention has been paid to estimating the emissions from different income households in previous literature, the full impacts of households on carbon emissions of production sectors through changing income are not well captured. Therefore, for better supporting the fair but different carbon emission reduction policy design for households and provinces, this paper investigates the unequal impacts of households on total emissions and sectoral emissions by specifically taking into account the heterogeneity among different income households in different provinces under the empirical context of China. A combination of semi-closed input-output model and hypothetical extraction method is used here to quantify the unique effect of each income class of households. We find five aspects of seriously unequal impacts of different income households among Chinese provinces: (1) the more responsibility for reducing carbon emissions should be allocated to Shandong, Hebei, Jiangsu, Inner Mongolia, Henan, Guangdong, Shanxi and Liaoning; (2) more unequal impacts on total provincial emissions between urban and rural households in Beijing, Tianjin, Inner Mongolia, Liaoning, Jilin, Heilongjiang, Shanghai, Zhejiang, Guangdong and Chongqing; (3) unequal impacts of urban (or rural) households on total provincial emissions exist among provinces; (4) unequal impacts of households on total provincial emissions exist among income classes and among provinces; (5) unequal impacts of urban households on emissions of sectors exist among provinces. These pictures of the inequality can provide more evidence for making fair but distinguishing carbon emission reduction policies for different income households across Chinese provinces.