Sectoral Decomposition of CO2 World Emissions: A Joint Quantile Regression Approach

Different economic sectors interact with each other and contribute in increasing CO₂ emissions in different ways and with different intensities. A modeling framework describing CO₂ cross-sectoral dependencies could be fruitful to authorities providing guidance to policies on emissions regulations and environment preservation. After surveying the existing literature that investigates on the relationship between urbanization and CO₂ emissions, we focus on the role of quantile regression in environmental modeling to provide a more complete view of the the nexus between socio-demographic factors and CO₂ emissions coming from different sources of economic activities, that can be missed by other regression methods. In particular, using a new joint quantile regression approach, in this paper we consider a sectoral disaggregation of total CO₂ emissions of 154 world countries and hypothesize a heterogeneous effect of population, urbanization, industrialization and economic growth in different sectors and at different quantile levels of the multivariate CO₂ distribution.