دانلود رایگان مقاله قیمت سایه ای انتشار CO2 در صنعت آهن و فولاد چین

abstract

As China becomes the world's largest energy consumer and CO2 emitter, there has been a rapidly emerging literature on estimating China's abatement cost for CO2 using a distance function approach. However, the existing studies have mostly focused on the cost estimates at macro levels (provinces or industries) with few examining firm-level abatement costs. No work has attempted to estimate the abatement cost of CO2 emissions in the iron and steel industry. Although some have argued that the directional distance function (DDF) is more appropriate in the presence of bad output under regulation, the choice of directions is largely arbitrary. This study provides the most up-to-date estimate of the shadow price of CO2 using a unique dataset of China's major iron and steel enterprises in 2014. The paper uses output quadratic DDF and investigates the impact of using different directional vectors representing different carbon mitigation strategies. The results show that the mean CO2 shadow price of China's iron and steel enterprises is very sensitive to the choice of direction vectors. The average shadow prices of CO2 are 407, 1226 and 6058 Yuan/tonne respectively for the three different direction vectors. We also find substantial heterogeneity in the shadow prices of CO2 emissions among China's major iron and steel enterprises. Larger, listed enterprises are found to be associated lower CO2 shadow prices than smaller, unlisted enterprises.

5. Conclusions and policy implications

The iron and steel industry is one of the most energy-intensive industries contributing substantial amount of China's energy consumption and CO2 emissions. It has been widely believed that the industry has taken on significant carbon mitigation to help fulfil the energy and emission intensity targets set by the Chinese government. However, whether this remains the case under China's proposed national carbon trading market will largely depends on the MAC of carbon mitigation.

In this paper, we estimated the CO2 shadow prices of China's 49 major iron and steel enterprises in 2014 based on DDF approach using three different DVs: g = (1, −1), g = (1, 0) and g = (0, −1) representing three different production and emissions abatement strategies. The results show that the mean CO2 shadow price of China's iron and steel enterprises is very sensitive to the choice of direction vectors. The average shadow prices of CO2 are 407, 1226 and 6058 Yuan/tonne respectively for the three different direction vectors. In addition, we found that the choice of directions also has an impact on the order of the sequence of the MAC estimates. One might get robust estimates of mean shadow prices but results are much less robust in terms of the order when using different directions.

Our estimate of the mean MAC level in the iron and steel industry is very much comparable to those in other industries found in recent literature. However, we show that arbitrarily chosen direction vectors as is common practice in this literature may substantially underestimate the potential of low-cost abatement opportunities and the benefit of carbon trading. We also find significant difference in the mean and dispersion of MAC across groups of iron and steel enterprises with different characteristics, suggesting both intra-group and inter-group heterogeneity in MAC. Larger, listed enterprises are found to be associated lower CO2 shadow prices than smaller, unlisted enterprises. Our findings provide useful information for better-informed carbon mitigation policy making and strong support for China's proposed national carbon trading market.