Employing the CGE model to analyze the impact of carbon tax revenue recycling schemes on employment in coal resource-based areas: Evidence from Shanxi

Assessing regional employment effects of the national emission trading scheme in China: Does Okun's law work?

Employment creation and climate change mitigation are core tasks for achieving sustainable development goals. Whether or not carbon mitigation policy facilitate employment deserves deep exploration. Through the construction of multi-regional dynamic computable general equilibrium model (CGE) with more scientific energy & environment block, this paper first evaluates regional employment effects of the national emission trading scheme (ETS) in China. Furthermore, we explore the Okun's law of the national ETS based on the mediating effect model. The results show that whether in carbon-intensive industries (CIIs) or non-carbon-intensive industries (NCIIs), employment effects of the national ETS are differentiated across regions. Specifically, the national ETS generally promotes CIIs' employment in Southern, Eastern, Middle Yangtze River and Southwest regions, and has negative effects on CIIs' employment in other regions. Meanwhile, the national ETS brings employment creation to NCIIs of Southern region, while there are opposite results in NCIIs of Northeast region and mixed results in NCIIs of other regions. Moreover, the Okun's law of the national ETS holds in CIIs of each region, but it not fits the data for NCIIs. Therefore, it is important for the Chinese government to consider the differentiated employment effects in different regions carefully rather than adopt one-size-fit-all solution when constructing the national carbon market.

Multi-scenario reduction pathways and decoupling analysis of China's sectoral carbon emissions

To achieve its goal of carbon emissions peak and neutrality, China requires synergistic efforts across all sectors. In this study, three scenarios-baseline, policy, and green low-carbon-were developed to explore the pathways for China's emissions reduction across sectors from 2020 to 2060, and the timing of decoupling economic growth from CO2. The results showed that, under these scenarios, China's carbon emissions peak in 2030, 2026, and 2025, with strong decoupling time, lagged one year behind peak attainment. The agriculture, forestry, livestock, and fishing (AFH) and mining and quarrying (MQ) sectors would be the first to achieve a carbon peak. Under all three scenarios, all of the other sectors-with the exception of electricity, gas, and water production and supply (EGW)-will achieve a carbon peak by 2030. Therefore, policymakers should set carbon peak goals based on sector characteristics and ensure energy security in the process of achieving carbon neutrality.

The individual and combined impact of environmental taxes in Chile - A flexible computable general equilibrium analysis

Many studies simulate carbon taxes with computable general equilibrium (CGE) models, but there is scarce evidence about how other environmental taxes implemented simultaneously reinforce or lessen the impacts. This study aims to determine the individual and combined effect of taxes on CO₂ and other local air pollutants (SO₂, NO_X, and PM) currently applied in Chile. A flexible CGE model is used to sensitize the results, allowing two nested production structures to be compared. Both nested production structures include a high disaggregation of the energy sector that considers different fossil fuels and renewable energies. The results show that environmental taxes reduce between 5.4% and 6.9% of net CO₂ equivalent emissions in the most realistic scenarios. In addition, the carbon tax explains 84%-85% of the drop in net CO₂ equivalent emissions, 81%-82% of the reduction in fossil energy consumption, 76%-78% of the decline in GDP, and generates co-benefits by reducing local air pollutants. The tax on PM emissions is the second more relevant to reduce net CO₂ equivalent emissions, while taxes on SO₂ and NO_X emissions have marginal effects. By comparing the impacts of both structures to previous studies based on microdata, it is concluded that the KL-EM provides the best results.

The distributional effects of China'senvironmental taxation: A multi-regional analysis

Environmental taxation is regarded as an effective tool to improve air quality in China, but its distributional effects causing serious disparity among multi-groups and multi-regions are understudied. Here this paper constructs a multi-regional dynamic recursive computable general equilibrium (CGE) model to explore the distributional effects of China's environmental taxation among different income groups and regions, by specifying the elasticity parameters of urban households' consumption in the model, and combining with various micro-data such as household survey data and environmental statistics database. This paper simulates the air pollution reductions of China's environmental taxation, and the impacts on the income and expenditure of households with various environmental tax rates or manners of tax revenue recycling. Results have shown that China's environmental taxation will widen the gap between different income groups and different regions. Also, such adverse distributional effects will be increased by higher environmental tax rates. However, recycling environmental tax revenues to both households and enterprises can reduce the losses of households' income and consumption. Yet recycling revenues to enterprises is more effective in narrowing the gap between income groups and regions while improving regional economic development. Our findings may pave a way to design appropriate environmental tax rates and tax revenue recycling manners for China's future environmental tax policies at the regional level.

How Does the Carbon Tax Influence the Energy and Carbon Performance of China’s Mining Industry?

As the world’s largest energy consumer, China’s CO2 emissions have significantly risen, owing to its rapid economic growth. Hence, levying a carbon tax has become essential in accelerating China’s carbon neutralization process. This paper employs the two-stage translog cost function to calculate the price elasticity of the mining industry’s energy and input factors. Based on the price elasticity, the carbon tax’s influence on the mining industry’s energy and carbon performance is estimated. In the calculation of energy efficiency, the non-radial directional distance function is adopted. The results express that the carbon tax significantly decreases the mining industry’s CO2 emissions and promotes its energy and carbon performance. In addition to levying a carbon tax, the government should also strengthen the market-oriented reform of the oil and power infrastructure to optimize the mining industry’s energy structure.

Does a Recycling Carbon Tax with Technological Progress in Clean Electricity Drive the Green Economy?

The environmental issue is a significant challenge that China faces in leading the development of the green economy. In this context, reducing CO₂ emissions is the key to combatting this problem. Taking the 2017 social accounting matrix (SAM) as the database and combing macroeconomic parameters from previous studies, this article constructed the environmentally computable general equilibrium (CGE) model as an analytical model to analyze the economic–environmental–energy impacts of recycling carbon tax with technological progress in clean electricity. We found that when the rate of clean electricity technological progress reaches 10%, the carbon recycling tax that reduces corporate income taxes will achieve a triple dividend of the carbon tax, namely, promoting economic development, reducing carbon emissions, and improving social welfare. In the meantime, on the basis of carbon tax policies that raise the price of fossil energy, clean electricity technological progress will help accelerate the transformation of electricity structure, reduce the proportion of thermal power generation, and better promote emission reduction. In addition, due to the high carbon emission coefficient, coal contributes significantly to carbon emission reduction. Therefore, China should implement a carbon tax recycling policy supplemented by the progress of clean power technology as soon as possible to better promote green economy development.

Forecasting of China's solar PV industry installed capacity and analyzing of employment effect: based on GRA-BiLSTM model

With the acceleration of China's energy transformation process and the rapid increase of renewable energy market demand, the photovoltaic (PV) industry has created more jobs and effectively alleviated the employment pressure of the labor market under the normalization of the epidemic situation. First, to accurately predict China's solar PV installed capacity, this paper proposes a multi-factor installed capacity prediction model based on bidirectional long short-term memory-grey relation analysis. The results show that, the MAPE value of the GRA-LSTM combined model established in this paper is 5.995, compared with the prediction results of other models, the prediction accuracy of the GRA-BiLSTM model is higher. Second, the BiLSTM model is used to forecast China's installed solar PV capacity from 2020 to 2035. The forecast results show that China's newly installed solar PV capacity will continue to grow and reach 2833GW in 2035. Third, the employment number in China's solar PV industry during 2020-2035 is predicted by the employment factors (EF) method. The results show that the energy transition in China during 2020-2035 will have a positive impact on the future stability and growth of the labor market in the solar PV industry. Overall, an accurate forecast of solar PV installed capacity can provide effective decision support for planning electric power development strategy and formulating employment policy of solar PV industry.

A factorial CGE model for analyzing the impacts of stepped carbon tax on Chinese economy and carbon emission

Carbon tax is a powerful incentive to mitigate carbon emissions and promote energy revolutions. It is of vital importance to systematically explore and examine the socio-economic impacts of levying a carbon tax, such that desired compromises among socio-economic and environmental objectives can be identified. In order to fill the research gap on the stepped carbon tax, this study is to develop a factorial computable general equilibrium (FCGE) model for examining the interactive effects of multiple policy options (e.g., grouping of emission intensity/level, and relevant tax rates), and supporting the formulation of desired carbon-mitigation policies. It is discovered that (1) carbon tax of 18.37 to 38.25 Yuan/ton is a reasonable policy alternative for China; (2) the stepped carbon tax (high level on coal-related fuels) is more efficiency than conventional carbon tax policy; (3) the positive effects for reducing carbon emission intensity can be strengthened with an increasing step range; (4) interactive effects between stepped carbon taxes on coal-related energies and crude oil related energies should be jointly considered by the policy makers.