How Do Imports Change the Carbon Emissions of China? An Analysis of Its Role in Intermediate Inputs and Final Demands

The import dependency of China decreases rapidly from 27% in 2007 to 14% in 2020. Nevertheless, how this impacts its carbon emissions embodied in final demands is unclear, which is not conducive to the policy synergy between import trade and carbon neutrality target. With the time-series input-output (I-O) datasets of China from 2007 to 2019, this study employs I-O analysis and structural decomposition analysis to explore the imports impact issue. The results indicate the following: (1) Improving final demand structure can release great carbon emissions reduction potentials in China. (2) The input import and demand import effects drive China’s carbon emissions embodied in different final demands to increase approximately more than 12% and less than 4%, respectively. (3) Input imports effect drives the embodied carbon emissions of electricity, gas, and water supply sector from supply side and those of electrical and optical equipment sector from demand side to increase by 332.5 Mt-CO2 and 182 Mt-CO2, respectively, which are mainly contributed by several critical sectors such as construction and basic metals and fabricated metal. (4) Demand imports effect chiefly affects the embodied carbon emissions of several sectors, such as machinery, electrical and optical equipment sector, and transport equipment