Author: Jane Golley, Crawford

With Copenhagen just under way, there will be much finger-pointing about who is responsible for reducing global CO₂ emissions, and China is likely to be the number one target.

Yet a significant portion of China’s emissions are generated in the production of exports, to the developed world in particular. Should we be shouldering some of the responsibility for reducing these emissions through financial or other means, rather than playing a blame game in which Australia is far from an innocent bystander? Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Jane Golley

In their recent paper on Trade, Technology and the Environment: Why have poor countries regulated sooner?, Mary Lovely and David Popp observe that late developers have tended to regulate coal-fired power plants at much lower levels of per capita income, because of technological advances made by the pioneers of environmental regulation.

They go on to examine how the availability of new pollution-abating technology speeds up the adoption of environmental regulation in developing economies, focusing in particular on the role of international trade and trade policies in knowledge and cost transmission. The good news – for free traders and greens alike – is that trade openness increases access to environmentally-friendly technologies, which results in earlier adoption of regulations to limit environmental damage. This implies that such technologies may well provide the key to sustainable development, so it’s good news for scientists and innovators too. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Jane Golley

Henry Paulson Jr.’s article in the September/October 2008 issue of Foreign Affairs provides a timely and insightful analysis of how strategic economic engagement is strengthening the U.S.-China bilateral relationship. Paulson, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, starts with the premise that engagement is the best path for the next American president to choose in response to China’s emergence as a global power. While recognising that there will inevitably be tensions between the two countries – particularly in the realms of China’s military modernization, its enforcement of intellectual property and its human rights record – Paulson argues that nothing should stand in the way of cooperation, based on mutual understanding, equality and trust. To illustrate, he focuses on the successes of the U.S.-China Strategic Economic Dialogue (SED), launched by President George W. Bush and President Hu Jintao in 2006. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Jane Golley

China faces huge challenges in striving for a balanced, sustainable development path, and Australia has a big role in promoting open trade and investment in China.

While China’s progress in the past three decades is striking, the Chinese leadership still faces huge challenges in steering the economy and its people towards a more comprehensive, balanced and sustainable development path, the three keystones of President Hu Jintao’s ‘Scientific Outlook on Development’. All of these challenges are substantially more difficult in light of the fact that China is still a reforming economy, with incomplete reforms in the banking sector and financial markets, labour markets and state-owned enterprises, to name a few. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Jane Golley

While it seems obvious that households in China with higher incomes will emit more – both directly through their consumption of coal, gas, petrol and electricity, and indirectly through their consumption of other goods, all of which require energy in their production processes – it is less obvious whether rich households will be more or less “emissions-intensive”, that is, emitting more or less carbon per yuan spent. My chapter with Dominic Meagher and Meng Xin in the China Update this year investigates variations in energy requirements and carbon emissions across urban households with different income levels. We find that poorer households are more emissions-intensive and that this is mainly due to their relatively high levels of coal consumption, the least “green” form of energy.

In terms of China’s future emissions trends, policymakers need to find ways to reduce the coal dependence of poorer urban, and presumably most rural, households. Income growth may partially solve the problem, given that richer households tend to consume less coal. However, appropriate investments and infrastructure will also need to be directed towards cleaner energy alternatives in the near future. See chapter for further details.