Author(s)

Yu-Chieh Chang¹, Sheng-Ming Hsu², Ching-Cheng Chang³, Shih-Hsun Hsu^1*

¹Department of Agricultural Economics, National Taiwan University, Taipei City.
²Department of Applied Economics, National Chung Hsing University, Taichung.
³Institute of Economics, Academia Sinica, Taipei City.

Recently Helm (2020) provides an excellent review and preliminary assessment of the environmental impacts of the Coronavirus. He concludes that “The evidence from the pandemic is that it is not the case that decoupling has occurred at the global level, or even at the European level. Emissions and GDP have both fallen sharply” (p. 3). Using the case of Taiwan, this study provides a local evidence to support Helm (2020)’s proposition. GDP and emissions in Taiwan have been highly correlated in the coronavirus pandemic. However, we found that there exists a significant asymmetry of the correlation (or coupling) between GDP and CO2 emission under each period of prosperity and depression from 2005 to 2020. In this respect, the analysis of the causal link between CO2 emission and GDP under the depression period like that in the coronavirus pandemic cannot be considered as a trivial duplicate of the analysis under the prosperous period.

Coronavirus, Climate Change, Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Asymmetric Adjustment, Decoupling

Chang, Y. , Hsu, S. , Chang, C. and Hsu, S. (2020) Asymmetric Coupling of GDP and Emissions in the Coronavirus Pandemic—The Case of Taiwan. Modern Economy, 11, 1441-1450. doi: 10.4236/me.2020.118102.