Economic inequality and carbon inequality: Multi-evidence from China's cities and counties

Despite economic inequality (EI) and carbon inequality (CI) are both core targets for sustainable development goals (SDGs), the current studies on EI and CI still lacks in-depth investigation, hindering to formulate policy towards better balancing social welfare improvement and carbon emission reduction. To address the gap above, the study comprehensively analyzed on the trends and drivers of EI and CI in a case of 262 cities over 2002-2019 and 1434 counties over 2005-2017 in China at individual level and aggregate level, respectively. Further, we explored the decoupling relationship between EI and CI and corresponding driver using an inequality-based decoupling decomposition model we proposed. We found that almost all cities, counties and corresponding sub-groups presented overall declining trends for EI and CI except for county groups over the period, where the within difference was the main driver. Further, the change of population proportion and the regional ranking have promoted the reduction of EI and CI at city- and county-levels. Decoupling analysis implied that the main decoupling state between EI and CI was weak negative decoupling for cities and counties, where the changes in regional ranking and per capita carbon emission were the negative and positive drivers, respectively. The study highlights the importance of reducing EI and CI simultaneously for policy implication.