What contributes to the growth of China's embodied CO2 emissions? Incorporating the global value chains concept

Global value chains (GVCs) not only reshape trade patterns but also influence trade-related emissions worldwide. This paper estimates China's aggregate and industrial embodied CO2 emissions in international fragmentation production networks in 2000-2014, and further adopts the chaining structural decomposition analysis (SDA) incorporating the GVCs concept to identify the effect of production fragmentation on embodied CO2 emissions. In addition, heterogeneities in different trade patterns (i.e. pure domestic, traditional, simple, and complex trades) are also examined. The chaining SDA results show that the increase in GVCs leads to China's embodied CO2 emissions growth, in which the relocation effect of final products is greater than that of intermediate products. Moreover, China's embodied CO2 emissions are mainly induced by pure domestic demand, with trade-related activities accounting for less than 30%. Furthermore, the effect of traditional final demand trade activity is outstripping that of those rising from the simple and complex GVCs activities.