Decoupling of the Growing Exports in Foreign Trade from the Declining Gross Exports of Embodied Energy

Transforming the growth mode and realizing green and low-carbon development has been a global consensus and an important governance concept of socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new era. Whether economic growth can be decoupled from carbon emissions and energy consumption is a key indicator for measuring green and low-carbon development and is an inevitable requirement for achieving the goal of carbon neutrality before 2060. Based on the input–output tables for 2002, 2007, 2012, and 2018, this article calculated the embodied energy of export in China’s foreign trade and studied the elastic relationship and trend between the growth of foreign trade exports and the total embodied energy of export since China’s accession to the WTO. The following conclusions were drawn: (i) The embodied energy of China’s export was strongly decoupled from total export for the first time from 2012 to 2018, signaling that China’s economic, industrial, and energy structures entered a new stage. It was also the first strong decoupling achieved in the process of decoupling economic growth from energy consumption for the adoption of a low-carbon development path. Due to the pressure of international competition, the export sector had a relatively advanced level of efficiency, so it achieved decoupling earlier than the overall manufacturing sector and the consumption sector, which was in line with economic laws and the characteristics of China’s development stage. (ii) From 2007 to 2018, the embodied energy of export occupied a much smaller proportion of China’s total energy consumption, falling from the peak of 31.48% in 2007 to 26.57%, a drop of 4.91 percentage points. It showed that a larger share of energy consumption had taken place domestically and that the model mainly relying on export expansion to drive economic growth had begun to adjust. The conclusion of this research could also support the assertion of ‘accelerating the construction of a new development pattern with the domestic economic cycle as the main body and the domestic and international dual cycles promoting each other’ from the perspective of external exports and energy consumption. (iii) A causal analysis of the decoupling between the embodied energy of export and export volume demonstrated that, from 2002 to 2007 and from 2007 to 2012, the embodied energy of export and total export maintained the same direction but had different growth rates. The increase in total export volume was the main reason affecting the embodied energy of export. With the rapid growth of total export volume, the embodied energy of export was also growing rapidly. From 2012 to 2018, the embodied energy of export declined, and an analysis showed that the ‘total energy consumption coefficient’, i.e., technology effect, was the primary cause of the decline. With China’s high-quality development, green transformation, and other strategic advancements, the decoupling trend is expected to continue and expand to a larger economic field.