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Finding the essential factors driving carbon emissions is vital for the carbon reduction policy-making. Different from the existing research, this paper studied the separate influence of internal and external input structural changes on global carbon emissions. We applied structural decomposition analysis (SDA) to decompose the global carbon emission change into six factors: namely, the carbon emission intensity, the domestic input structure, the international input structure, consumption pattern, consumption volume and population. The results firstly showed that the contributions of different factors to global carbon emissions changed over time. In recent five years, structural changes of domestic inputs became the principle driver of decrease in global carbon emissions. Secondly, the results showed that there were significant differences for countries in their factors for carbon emissions. In India and Russia, domestic input structural change was the major contributor to the decrease in carbon emissions. In Japan and Germany, the most important factor for the increase in carbon emissions was the international input structure. Finally, the results showed the factors for carbon emission changes were correlated to economic development. The international input structural changes significantly increased carbon emissions in high-income countries. Our findings suggested that some countries such as India and Russia, improving the usage efficiency of domestic carbon-intensive products would help reducing carbon emissions. For most high-income countries such as Japan and Germany, they should reduce the dependence on the imported carbon-intensive products by turning the external input sources to countries with technology advantages. In addition, technology exportation of high-income countries would also be beneficial for the global carbon reduction., (Copyright © 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)