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Assessing the Inequality of Spanish Households through the Carbon Footprint: The 21st Century Great Recession Effect
Author(s) -
López Luis Antonio,
Arce Guadalupe,
Morenate Manuel,
Monsalve Fabio
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
journal of industrial ecology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.377
H-Index - 102
eISSN - 1530-9290
pISSN - 1088-1980
DOI - 10.1111/jiec.12466
Subject(s) - consumption (sociology) , economics , recession , poverty , inequality , goods and services , demographic economics , fell , labour economics , agricultural economics , development economics , economy , economic growth , geography , macroeconomics , mathematical analysis , social science , mathematics , cartography , sociology
Summary Inequality has recently become a major concern in economics. Leaving aside its social and economic effects is also possible to trace its environmental consequences, which this article attempts to assess. The indicator to be measured is the household's carbon footprint (CF) for different social groups. The deep economic crisis in the Spanish economy between 2008 and 2013 has increased consumption inequality and doubled the number of households below the poverty line. When focusing on domestic consumption, we found that the shopping basket of all income groups has very similar emissions intensities; therefore, the differences among the household CFs depend mainly on the scale effect (i.e., the size of consumption). However, when international trade is also considered, we found that the emission intensity of imports is bigger than the intensity of all the respective domestic goods. Therefore, the share of imported goods and services by social class will be an important determinant of the respective total CF. Before the crisis, households with higher incomes imported 30% of their total consumption items whereas households with lower income imported only 20% of their consumption. During the crisis, the imports of medium‐high‐income households fell to 20%, whereas low‐ and middle‐income families maintained the same import share, which contributed to the reduction of the total household CF.