Income Gap,Preferences Differences And Environmental Pollution

In recent years, China achieved drapid economic growth, at the same time, the environmental pollution problems has become more serious. To solve them:one method is reducing pollution emissions from the source through the adjustment of industrial structure, energy structure and trade structure; another is strengthening the end treatment such as increaseing investment, strengthening the regulation. The former solution subjects to the inherent law of economic growth and domestic resource endowments, the adjustment and optimization cannot be done onenight whereas the later solution is limited by the social and economic disparity, the the expanded individual endowment gap will reduce the degree of joint efforts.In the society-economy-ecological environment system, if the the rich countries (regions) can displace pollution to poor countries (regions) easily or the advantage group can transfer environmental pollution to disadvantage group easily, the poor countries (regions) or disadvantage group will be the victims of pollution. The paper regards the dual structure as the the source environmental problems and elaborates that widespread environmental inequity make the environmental governance more difficult and thus more environmental pollution.The paper is divided into eight chapters. The significance, the research methods, the research perspective and the structure of the paper are explained in Chapter I. The reasons of generation of environmental pollution and lack of environmental pollution control from the theoretical and empirical basis are reviewed in the next chapter. The general principle that unfair economic and social institution leads to the unsustainable society-economy and brings more environmental pollution is explaned in the third chapter. Next, the.author uses Chinese General Social Survey data to examine the reality of environmental pollution risk differences between different groups in China and Make an economic explanation in the fourth chapter. An endogenous model of economic growth is established and China’s provincial panel data empirical analysis is used to prove the equality hypothesis that the greater the degree of income inequality, the worse the quality of the environment in Chapter V. To study Chinese environmental preferences, an order response model is established to examine the determinants that affect residents’ environmental preferences from the individual socio-economic characteristics, social participation characteristics and individual demographic characteristics perspective in Chapter VI. The Xiamen anti-PX incident is taken as a case to study why environmental NIMBY problems occur and analyze the role of government, businesses and the public in Chapter VII. At last, the paper makes a summary and put forward a comprehensive socio-economic change to reduce and control environmental pollution in Chapter Ⅷ.The main conclusions of this paper are as follows:1. Unlike the universality of environmental pollution, often environmental pollution bring different groups different risk, the groups with the middle-income level, the extent of secondary education and industry practitioners suffer higher damage risk;2. Widen of income inequality will make the decline of middle income voters and thus reduce the preference for environmental quality of whole society, this will leads to more environmental pollution;3. Environmental preference of residents is affected by a variety of socio-economic factors such as the education level of individuals and area of residence except for personal income levels;4. In pollution governance, government and firms constitute imbalance structure, therefore, it is essential for the public to participate environmental policy decision and express their environmental preferences.