Are the Paris Agreement Efforts Equally Shared? GDP and CO2 Production Regularities

Résumé 0

This study investigates regularities in the production of GDP and CO2 emissions for 84 countries between 1980-2014. The empirical strategy is derived from an ecological-economic framework in which both outputs are produced employing capital, energy and labor. Moreover, we propose an expanded version of the Kaya identity, which creates a link between the growth rate of CO2 emissions and capital accumulation to evaluate the distribution of abatement efforts under the Paris Agreement. By using a new dataset, we found evidence of relative decoupling in developing countries and absolute decoupling in some developed countries. Our findings show that the individual voluntary definition of the emission targets under the Agreement resulted in an unequal distribution of the abatement efforts among developing and developed countries. In the absence of higher energy or environment-saving technical changes, the required reductions in capital accumulation are sharper for developing than developed countries.