Study of driven factors of provincial CO_2 emission in China based on directional distance function approach

Using the nonparametric framework of directional distance function,this paper decomposes the driven factors of the changes of provincial CO2 emission in China into seven components for the time period 1990-2009,including GDP scale effect,technical efficiency effect,technical change effect,emission indices associated with capital,labor and energy,and GDP composition effect.Some conclusions are as follows: the GDP scale effect accounts for the majority of emission increment;the capital-carbon ratio effect is a dominant contributor to provincial emission abatement;the labor-carbon ratio effect is also the main driver of emission increment;the energy-carbon ratio effect has began to decrease the emission since 2001;the effect of technical change,technical efficiency and GDP composition is negligible.