As China advances its national carbon emissions trading scheme (ETS) alongside reforming its power sector, understanding the price-transmission channels among these markets is vital for effective decarbonization. Utilizing daily data from July 2021 to December 2025, this study examines price interactions among China’s national carbon market, electricity prices in the pioneering Shanxi spot market, and regional fossil-fuel prices. Methodologically, it employs an event-study design with a vector error correction model and multivariate regression models. The event study reveals that regulatory announcements are associated with notable event-related price fluctuations in the carbon market. The econometric results confirm a long-run cointegration between carbon and thermal coal prices, reflecting structural energy-to-carbon price linkages. While prices in the electricity spot market remain strongly driven by underlying daily coal and natural gas costs, they display no statistically significant association with daily carbon-price fluctuations, indicating that under the current framework of fully free allowance allocation, carbon costs are yet to noticeably permeate spot-market bidding behavior. These findings demonstrate that deeper power-sector liberalization and technology-neutral carbon benchmarking are needed to unlock effective carbon-to-electricity cost pass-through in China.

The grand design has been formulated recently for the "Growth-oriented Carbon Pricing" concept in Japan. The blended approach, combining voluntary participation of the businesses with phased regulatory enforcement, deserves attention due to its potential to serve as a model for other countries in Asia. This paper gives an overview of the latest progress in the practices of carbon pricing mechanisms in Japan. Under the green transformation (GX) initiative, carbon pricing mechanisms have been planned systematically but could start from low levels. The emissions trading scheme, namely GX-ETS, is currently implemented on trial in the first phase, and will establish a mandatory market mechanism after full-scale operation in fiscal year 2026 (FY2026). Fossil fuel levy will be launched in FY2028, and emission allowances will be allocated to specified businesses by auctions from FY2033. To support the smooth and effective implementation of carbon pricing mechanisms in operation and planning in Japan, several issues are suggested for further studies. These issues include the policy stringency necessary for achieving the announced mitigation targets, the behaviour changes of highly affected businesses, and the design of policy revenue recycling.