Abstract: In recent years, climate change problems such as the greenhouse effect caused by carbon dioxide emissions seem to be more and more concerned by communities. In this paper, carbon embodied in export trade of a region and the driving factors are studied. A nested structural decomposition analysis model based on input-output table was constructed to study the driving factors, including energy consumption structure, energy consumption intensity, adjusted Leontief inverse matrix, export structure, consumption expansion, investment expansion, export scale expansion, import substitution and technical factors. Also, a case study on Jiangsu province was conducted with the proposed models. The result showed that Jiangsu province's carbon emissions embodied in export trade during 2002—2007 grew rapidly compared with that of 1997—2002. The change of export structure, final demand expansion and export scale expansion are the main factors for the increase of the embodied carbon emissions. And energy efficiency improvement is the main reason for the decrease of the carbon emissions embodied in export trade.