A race between economic growth and carbon emissions: What play important roles towards global low-carbon development?

Abstract Revealing the decoupling process between global economy and its carbon emissions is a key breakthrough point to seek the pathways of global low-carbon economic development. The aim of this study is to identify determinant factors of decoupling carbon emissions from global economic growth, by using the panel data of 78 regions during 2000–2017 and the Tapio model with a comprehensive decomposition framework. The results show that: (1) the global decoupling relationship experienced five stages: weak decoupling, expansive coupling, expansive negative decoupling, recessive decoupling, and strong decoupling. Overall, Europe and North America largely contributed to global decoupling process (−6.51% and −2.37%, respectively), while Asia is the opposite (99.12%); (2) the technology progress in energy-saving (−203.28%) and production efficiency (−93.51%) played the principal roles in promoting global decoupling, energy structure optimization (−9.7%) also exerted active effects in promoting decoupling process; (3) however, the per capita gross domestic product growth (192.37%), and population expansion (48.8%) formed restriction in global carbon-economy decoupling process.