The economic burden of a carbon tax on Chinese residents: A gender and income perspective

Abstract

Consumption-based carbon accounting helps identify key groups that influence emission reduction efforts, but current research primarily focuses on consumption differences among different income groups, neglecting the impact of gender characteristics on emissions and the potential differentiated effects of emission reduction policies on different gender groups. Therefore, on the basis of a detailed description of the consumption structure of residents grouped by income and gender, this study takes China as an example to examine the indirect carbon emissions from residents' product consumption. This study uses an input–output structural decomposition analysis model to investigate the contributions of five influencing factors to changes in consumption-based carbon emissions in China and uses an input–output price model to explore the economic burden of a carbon tax on residents grouped by gender and income. The results show that low-income females have the largest carbon tax burden ratio (i.e., the proportion of the carbon tax cost in the residents' total consumption expenditure), which is 1.12 times and 1.32 times higher than that of low-income residents and the average level, respectively. Specifically, 64.9 % (185.2 yuan) of females' carbon tax cost is related to housing consumption. Targeted implementation of supporting policies can obviously decrease the carbon tax cost of low-income residents and female residents, which can provide support for enhancing the fairness and inclusivity of emission reduction policies.