The Construction and Empirical Study on Evaluation Index System of International Low-Carbon Economy Development

Global climate change has become one of the core issues of world governance. Many countries have put forward the goal of carbon neutrality one after another, leading to the intensification of international low-carbon economy competition. To assess the current low-carbon competitiveness among countries, this article constructs an evaluation index system of international low-carbon economy development, and obtains the scores and rankings of countries in energy, society, economy and environment, as well as overall. Taking 20 countries with the highest carbon emissions in the world in 2019 as samples, starting from the concept of low-carbon economy and five evaluation principles, this article selects 40 low-carbon evaluation indicators from five aspects, including economy, society, science and technology, environment, and energy structure. By using the principal component factor analysis method to calculate and test, the four factors, energy factor, society factor, economy factor, and environment factor, are finally extracted to construct the evaluation index system. Results show that South Korea, France, China, Canada, and Germany are among the world’s top five low-carbon economies. The overall competitiveness of China’s low-carbon economy is in a relatively favorable position (3rd overall), with the most outstanding performance in terms of economic strength (1st), but poor performance in terms of social development (9th) and environmental carrying capacity (9th), and the biggest disadvantage in terms of energy structure (13th).