Carbon emissions marginal abatement cost and its influencing factors from the construction and hygienic ceramics manufacturing industries in China

Reducing China's carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions primarily involves efforts from energy-intensive sectors, including the construction and hygienic ceramics manufacturing industries. Although the majority of extant studies have focused on estimating marginal abatement cost (MAC) of CO₂ emissions, there are mainly four shortcomings: (i) most of studies have explored this issue at industrial level or provincial level, the evidence at the enterprise level is limited; ii) the selection of emissions abatement measures and strategies is normally arbitrary; iii) the characteristics of MAC changing with the amount of emissions reduction is usually ignored; and iv) the analysis of influencing factors for MACs is not included. Here, this study provided an innovative MAC estimation for China's 913 construction ceramics enterprises and 360 hygienic ceramic enterprises. A quadratic directional distance function method, including multiple emissions abatement measures and all possible directional vectors representing different emission reduction strategies, is applied to calculate the lowest MAC. We further incorporate the abatement level from 1 to 99% into MACs estimation, and investigated its influencing factors. The results mainly illustrated three relevant findings. (i) The average MAC for construction ceramics manufacturing is 2203 CNY/t CO₂, which is lower than that for hygienic ceramics manufacturing of about 8416 CNY/t CO₂. (ii) Construction ceramics production enterprises would be willing to downscale production to achieve the lowest cost for emissions reduction, whereas hygienic ceramics production enterprises tend to choose increasing the intermediate input. (iii) Energy use efficiency positively influences MACs for both construction and hygienic ceramics production enterprises, while intermediate input rate, energy consumption structure (the proportion of fuel coal consumption in total energy) and profitability are negatively related to MAC. Results and findings can provide references for the formulation of carbon emission reduction policies in China's construction and hygienic ceramics manufacturing industries.