Rankings for Carbon Emissions and Economic Growth Decoupling
The main purpose of this chapter is to analyze decoupling between carbon emissions and economic activity for the different countries in the world within the 1990–2012 period. We qualify decoupling cases. Countries are ranked from those that decrease emissions while expanding activity (strong decoupling) to those that augment their greenhouse gases and are in recession (strong negative decoupling). For the cases in which there exists a conflict between growth and emissions (there is improvement in one indicator and worse conditions for the other), the orderings are two, depending if priority is given to the economy or to nature. The findings are that 30% of countries follow green growth paths, 50% weakly decouple their emissions from activity (emissions increase less than GDP), and 20% decouple expansively (their emissions increase more than GDP). There is almost difference between ranking countries giving priority to growth and prioritizing nature. Argentina ranks approximately in the 60th place among around 150 countries in the database and is one of the developing countries that weakly decoupled carbon emissions from economic activity in the period under study.