Research On China’s Trade Openness And Atmospheric Environment

Since the reform and opening to the outside world,China has been carrying out foreign trade,strengthening its trade links with other countries and opening up the trade.In 2015,China’s total exports reached 24312 dollars,while one ninth dollars of world’s total exported was produced in China.In the same year,China’ imports reached $20457,even more than the sum of all Latin American countries.However,with the deepening of China’s opening to the outside world and the continuous expansion of output scale,China’s environmental problems are becoming increasingly serious.China’s carbon emissions in 2015 reached 91.5 tons,accounting for nearly 1/3of the world total,and it is the world’s largest carbon emitter.At the same time,since2015,China’s many cities and regions in northern ocurred frequent large-scale haze,Beijing,Shenyang,Harbin and other cities’ PM2.5 was more than 1000ug/m3.With the deepening of trade openness and the deteriorating environment,the relationship between trade and environment has attracted wide attention of many scholars.However,due to technical reasons,few researchers take into account the spatial effects of air pollution,which has a bearing on the policy implications of the study.Therefore,this research method based on spatial econometrics,taking every provinces in China as the object of study,considering the spatial effect of atmospheric pollution,using panel data of industrial sulfur dioxide,carbon dioxide and dependence on foreign trade in 31 provinces of China,respectively establish the spatial autoregressive model,spatial error model and a spatial durbin model in order to demonstrate the effect of trade openness on the atmospheric environment.Firstly,through the collection and reading of the existing literature,this paper summarizes the research status of trade and environment at home and abroad,and gives a brief review of the existing literature,pointing out its contribution and shortcomings.On the basis of the existing literature,taking 31 provinces in China as the object of study,this paper analyzes the status of international trade and air pollution in China in the past thirty years.Then,the spatial distribution pattern of air pollution and trade openness as well as its internal reasons are analyzed by using spatial sub bitmap.Secondly,using the import and export and pollution emission data of China’s 31 provinces in 1995~2014 years,this paper uses the Moran index to test the spatial correlation of China’s trade openness and air pollution.Furthermore,the spatial dynamic transition processes in different provinces of China are studied byusing the Moran scatter plot.Than we calculate the carbon emission data of each province by using three kinds of energy consumption,based on spatial autoregressive model,spatial error model and a spatial Durbin model to test whether trade openness lead to deterioration of China’s environment.Finally,based on the empirical results of this paper,we put forward effective policy suggestions on how to change trade patterns,control environmental pollution,improve energy efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.This study finds that there are significant positive spatial autocorrelation of trade openness,air pollution and carbon emissions in China’s 31 provinces,which means that the data in every provinces are not independent,and there are obvious phenomena of spatial aggregation.Air pollution and carbon emissions in different provinces are not only affected by the economic,trade and other factors,but also by the characteristics of neighboring provinces.Whether it is air pollution or carbon emissions,there is no evidence that trade openness will lead to environmental degradation in our country.Contrary to many research findings,this paper finds that there is a relatively low emission reduction effect in trade openness.Economic growth and air pollution have significant EKC inverted U relation,and the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis is established in the province of China.The pollution emission of a province and the economic growth of its neighboring provinces are EKC inverted U relation,and the economic growth of the neighboring provinces can reduce the air pollution emissions in neighboring provinces after the level of 180.8billion RMB.The energy consumption,industrial structure and trade openness of the neighboring provinces have no obvious impact on the air pollution in this province.The trade openness of the neighboring provinces has a significant impact on the carbon dioxide emissions in this province.However,the economic growth,energy consumption and industrial structure of the neighboring provinces have no significant influence on the carbon dioxide in this province.According to the empirical results of this paper,it is suggested that the joint prevention and control measures should be adopted,and government should apply the same environmental standards in the pollution gathering area.In addition,we should improve the environmental monitoring system and strengthen the enforcement of the environmental protection departments.We will increase exports of high-tech and high value-added products and reduce the export of highly polluting and low value-added products.We should subsidize the export of high-tech products in our country,and levy pollution taxes on the export of China’s pollution intensive products,optimize theexport structure of our country and speed up the transition to high technology industries.Finally,China should establish a green performance evaluation standards,change the "highly value economy development,underrate environmental protection" of the traditional concept of development.