摘要：
Circular economy development (CED) has attracted a lot of attention from political leaders, academia, industrial sectors and entrepreneurs, with particular focus on its contribution to economic growth, job opportunity and competitive advantage. This paper intends to address two long-lasting but controversial questions for several good reasons: whether CED stimulates GDP growth and whether economic growth contributes to the decrease of CO2 emission? The main purpose of this paper is to deliver scientific-based answers to the questions raised above. Critical review on some empirical works is presented with particular focus on such problems as unit root, cointegration, and time-invariant coefficients. The main purpose of this paper is to deliver scientific-based answers to the two questions: whether CED stimulates GDP growth and whether economic growth contributes to the decrease of CO2 emission? This paper estimates a log-linear vector ARDL model with time-variant coefficients for real GDP and CO2 emission. We find that CED has positive contribution to real GDP in a nonlinear manner, with time-variant elasticity. As for the effect of CED on CO2 emission, only recycling rate could contribute to CO2 emission reduction while, on the contrary, DMC and PROD induce more emission. Additionally, we observe that the growth of real GDP tends to decrease CO2 emission at a decreasing rate, which confirms the fact that ‘economic growth’ is identified as one of SDGs, while negates the DeGrowth hypothesis and the general assessment of GDP to CO2 emission.
