Unequal Carbon Exchanges: The Environmental and Economic Impacts of Iconic U.S. Consumption Items

Abstract

SummaryIn this article, we track how consumption in the United States, a highly developed "core" country, triggers value added and carbon inequalities around the globe. We consider these two sources of inequality for all commodities and services consumed in the United States, and then for three specific sectors, these being electronics, motor vehicles, and wearing apparel. Our findings show how the production of commodities for U.S. consumption tends to reify inequalities between countries. Larger shares of value added (in comparison to shares of carbon emissions) are generally experienced by more-developed, more-integrated countries, whereas the opposite tendency is experienced in less-developed, less-integrated regions. We note how these between-country differences can depend on the product chains that are analyzed. Our article makes use of a novel combination of social network analysis and multiregional input-output analysis to better capture some intuitive ideas of global trade and its consequences.

Linking Local Consumption to Global Impacts

“…; Gomez‐Paredes et al. ; Prell and Feng ) or discuss inequality in income and consumption and associated environmental impacts (López et al. ).…”

“…A number of articles look specifically at differences in households’ consumption patterns, income and lifestyles, and environmental impacts associated with these differences at the national to global level (Ivanova et al. ; Prell and Feng ; Serrano et al. ) or at the subnational level (Burger Chakraborty et al.…”

“…Liang and colleagues (2016) examine deforestation and wood consumption in Russia arising from demand for timber, but especially nontimber imports, globally requiring timber from Russia as input to production. A number of articles look specifically at differences in households' consumption patterns, income and lifestyles, and environmental impacts associated with these differences at the national to global level (Ivanova et al 2015;Prell and Feng 2015;Serrano et al 2016) or at the subnational level (Burger Chakraborty et al 2016;López et al 2016;Steen-Olsen et al 2016;West et al 2015;Yu et al 2016).…”

“…They find that the share of imported goods and services is an important determinant of the carbon footprint and that higher-income households reduced their share of imported goods, thus leading to a decline in the overall contribution of households. Prell and Feng (2015), in "Unequal carbon exchanges: The environmental and economic impacts of iconic U.S. consumption items," investigate how the U.S. consumption for electronics, cars, and clothes triggers value added and carbon inequality around the globe using global MRIO and social network analysis for a country's position in the global market. They find that the more central or core a country in the global trade system, the more skewed in their favor is their position in global trade or, in other words, the higher the countries' share of global wealth in relation to its share of global pollution.…”

China's Trade‐Off Between Economic Benefits and Sulfur Dioxide Emissions in Changing Global Trade

“…Accompanied with such economic benefit is the disproportionally higher share of global energy consumption and emissions. For example, 13% of the global CO 2 emissions triggered by the U.S. consumption of the motor vehicle happens in China, which only obtained a much smaller proportion of the associated value added (2%) (Prell & Feng, ). The distribution of environmental losses and economic embodied in trade has gained more attention by academic communities.…”