Schedule 9th International Degrowth Conference

One key question within the existing literature on the interrelation between income, inequality and carbon emissions, is whether the combination of the normative goals of lowering inequality and reducing carbon emissions constitutes a virtuous social optimum (Rao and Min, 2018), or a social dilemma in which reducing inequality increases carbon emissions (Grunewald et al., 2017; Rojas-Vallejos and Lastuka, 2020).
If such a social dilemma indeed existed, it would require societies to decide upon a trade-off, making it imperative for science to shed light on this relationship. This study aims to combine the completeness of the household income distribution with the precision of linking emissions to income not through a constant elasticity, but through the intermediary of household consumption. The pivot challenge is therefore to predict consumption patterns of high-income households, in order to allocate their emissions correctly. We implement our methodology for the case of Ecuador.
This paper is the first to provide insights about the distribution of income, consumption and carbon emissions on the household level stemming directly from corrected household micro data.
Our model predicts that consumption patterns change also within the highest percentiles. More than 40% of total expenditure of the poorest households is spent on food and clothes, whereas the richest 0.1% spends less than 7% on these items. Further, mapping income of the ”missing rich” to their consumption, we provide improved estimates for classic Engel-curves and Environmental Engel-curves (Levinson and O’Brien, 2019) Our findings suggest that also for Ecuador carbon emissions marginally decrease as income raises.

Info

Day: 2023-08-30
Start time: 12:15
Duration: 00:15
Room: ZV-8-4
Type: Paper Presentation
Theme: Climate (in)justice

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