Are you talking about total country emissions or per capita?
Take for example, the USA and China (and SE Asia). The USA loves to brag about our efforts to clean up the (USA) environment; about all the improvements since the 70s. What's never (ever?) mentioned is how much of that was from manufacturing and that manufacturing has been outsourced to China/SE Asia (subject to even lower environmental protection standards). That production of emissions doesn't belong to the source of production per se, it belongs to the end point of consumption.
Measuring by per capita pollution and getting that measure down is the only sane way to count emissions. The end product is the same, total emissions go down, but we can focus on a metric that makes sense no matter how large the country you’re measuring is.
Sure, total emissions is what matters, but the formula for total emissions is:
Total Emissions = Emissions per capita * People