Convergence of carbon dioxide performance across Swedish industrial sectors: An environmental index approach

Abstract

Keywords: Convergence Carbon dioxide emission intensity Industry SwedenThe overall objective of the paper is to analyze convergence of CO 2 emission intensity across manufacturing sectors in Sweden. Our approach differs from previous work on carbon convergence in that it employs a theoretical framework to construct a CO 2 performance index, which explicitly takes into account that industrial firms produce good as well as bad outputs. This index is then used as the dependent variable in a growth-type regression equation. We employ a data set covering 14 industrial sectors over the time period 1990-2008. The results suggest the presence of conditional β-convergence in CO 2 performance among the industrial sectors in Sweden. Moreover, the speed of convergence varies significantly in the sense that the higher the capital intensity is, the lower is the convergence rate to the different steady states. This is likely to reflect the importance of -and in part the costs associated with -capital turnover to achieve a transition towards lower CO 2 emission paths.

Convergence in global environmental performance: assessing heterogeneity

“…Here we find strong evidence in support of conditional b-convergence in EP in the global sample. This finding is consistent with the finding in Brännlund et al (2015), which finds evidence of convergence in EP for Swedish industries and Camarero et al (2008) based on 22 OECD countries. Further, the results here indicate that the rate of convergence does not vary with capital and fossil fuel, when we employ the whole global sample.…”

“…As far as we know, we are among the first to do this based on a production theory framework at the global level. The only papers in the literature that studied convergence based on the production theory framework are Camarero et al (2008) and Brännlund et al (2015), but unlike our paper, Camarero et al focus only on a sample of OECD countries, while Brännlund et al focus on Swedish industries. Hence our work can therefore be seen as an extension of Camarero et al (2008) on two fronts; it extends to a global sample, and it looks specifically at it from a b-convergence perspective as done in Brännlund et al (2015) for Swedish industries.…”

Convergence of carbon intensity in the Yangtze River Delta, China

“…The interaction effect involving industrial structure is significant, implying that the larger the industrial structure, the lower the speed of convergence to the steady-state level (Br€ annlund et al, 2015). The result accords with that the higher proportion of the secondary industry, the more difficult to adjust the industrial structure (Hao et al, 2015a).…”

“…Interaction effect indicates that b may be different between prefecture-level cities (Br€ annlund et al, 2015). Other variables share the same meanings as in equation (3).…”

“…There is no convergence of carbon intensity (Evans & Kim, 2015) Swedish 1990e2008 Capital intensity is a significant negative factor for the convergence of carbon intensity between different industry sectors. (Br€ annlund et al, 2015) China 1995e2010…”