Exploring the drivers to energy-related carbon emissions changes at China's provincial levels.

This paper proposes an alternative method to decompose carbon emissions changes using distance functions estimated by data envelopment analysis. The proposed approach can measure the effects of technical efficiency change and technical change, the effects of substitution among inputs, and the effects of GDP composition change on the changes in carbon emissions. We apply this method to decompose the carbon emissions at China's provincial levels. For the 30 provinces as a whole during the 11th Five-Year Plan period (2006-2010), empirical results demonstrated that economic growth and the potential carbon factor changes were the largest contributors to carbon emissions increase, while the good output technical changes and energy usage technical changes were the largest components to carbon emissions reduction. The structure effects represented by GDP composition change was a mild contributor to carbon emissions reduction for most provinces. We found that the substitution effects among inputs existed and contributed to carbon emissions increase for most provinces, but their impacts were limited and differed across provinces. The impacts of the good output technical efficiency change and energy usage technical efficiency changes were extremely limited and different across provinces. The empirical results are beneficial to China's central and local governments to make regional adaptive policies to carbon emissions reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]