Who is Carbon Competitive?

This is the kind of question we will probably listen more and more in the future, according to Juan Delgado, researcher at Bruegel. In his latest Policy Brief, Why Europe is not Carbon Competitive, he analyzes the Carbon Content of EU's export basket (the content of CO2 per unit of export) to find that Europe is relatively more specialized in sectors with a medium to high level of emissions, compared to US and China.
Where does this result come from? Europe has a lower share of export in services and research intensive goods, compared to what happens in the US and Japan. Within Europe we find of course a quite diversified picture: UK, Norway and Ireland, for example, specialize more in technology goods, while Finland (paper), France (chemicals), Germany (metal products) export more carbon intensive products.
On average though, the performance is quite biased, and only India and Russia (among the big players worldwide) are less carbon competitive than Europe.
If Europe wants to still to lead the fight for Climate Change, now has a major global goal to achieve: ensure that all the key players (the US especially) of the world participate symmetrically into a global scheme to reduce CO2 emissions. Let's see what kind of deal comes out of Bali at the end of this week.