Nghiên cứu sinh Bùi Thị Hoàng Mai bảo vệ luận án tiến sĩ
ORIGINAL CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE DISSERTATION
Dissertation title: Optimal economic restructuring for reducing carbon emission intensity.
Specialization: Economics Specialization code: 9310101
PhD candidate: Bui Thi Hoang Mai
Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Le Quang Canh
Original contributions on academic and theoretical aspects
- The dissertation has developed a new adequate instrument to serve planning, monitoring, and evaluating economic structure in terms of reducing aggregate emission intensity.
This dissertation has applied the projected gradient method to solve the problem of optimal economic restructuring to reduce emission intensity. The result is a new instrument to find optimal economic structure in terms of lowering aggregate carbon emission intensity of a certain economy. The instrument helps recommend how much GDP share and emission intensity of each sector should be so that the economy can minimize its aggregate emission intensity.
- The instrument developed in this dissertation can be used to calculate the deviation between the actual and optimal economic structure. This deviation can work as a signal for choosing priority abatement measure. It can give recommendations to nations to choose between prioritizing optimal economic restructuring or focusing on deeply reducing sectorial emission intensity. The deviation can also be used as a variable to link rational economic structure with sustainable development performance of countries.
- The approach of finding optimal economic structure developed in this dissertation can be similarly applied to other problems of restructuring economy such as maximizing labor productivity, GDP and minimizing total emissions.
Recommendations derived from the findings of the dissertation
The findings of the dissertation recommend that countries need to pay attention to both changing the share of GDP by sectors and the reduction in emission intensity of each sector to reduce aggregate emission intensity more effectively. Industries with a large share of value added are responsible for drastic reduction in emission intensity.
Industries with high emission intensity need to narrow the share of output in the economy. If the reduction in the value-added share of high-emission-intensity sectors is in trouble, it is necessary to reduce the emission intensity of these sectors to compensate for the value-added share that cannot be reduced.
A country should combine economic restructuring with a deep reduction in the sectoral emission intensity if optimizing economic structure only helps reduce the aggregate emissions intensity of an economy by a small percentage. Conversely, a country should focus on measures of economic restructuring if optimizing economic structure will help the country reduce aggregate emissions intensity at a significant rate.
