Abstract
It is crucial for China to achieve the dual-carbon goal by precisely identifying key industries of carbon emissions and achieving orderly and coordinated synergistic emission reduction across provinces. Unlike the existing research and practice on key industries of carbon emissions, which ignore provincial differences, this paper takes into account the flow characteristics of products and services in industries within provinces as well as the differential characteristics in the level of economic development and social factors among provinces and constructs a multi-layer network model of carbon emissions based on the provincial-level input-output data of China in 2012, 2015 and 2017. Moreover, we improve the PageRank algorithm to rank the importance of nodes in the multi-layer network. The empirical results indicate that China’s top-ranking industries of carbon emission include high-carbon industries such as metal smelting and chemical industry, which are mainly distributed in provinces such as Hebei and Liaoning. Meanwhile, the production and supply industries of electric power and heat has gradually evolved into key industries of carbon emissions in most provinces of China due to its distinctions in fundamentals, livelihood, and high technology content. In addition, unlike provinces with relatively lower carbon emission intensity, such as Beijing and Shanghai, provinces with comparatively higher carbon emission intensity, such as Ningxia and Inner Mongolia, have key industries of carbon emissions such as electronics, machinery manufacturing industry and transportation. The conclusions of this research provide theoretical support for precise synergistic emission reduction strategies in various Chinese provinces.