Economic Growth And Environmental Quality

Yangze River Delta has resulted in unprecedented economic expansion since 1978. However, rapid economic growth puts huge pressure on the environment. Thus, it is very important to research the relationship between economic growth and environmental protection.Paper tries to solve four questions. (1) Does environmental change in Yangze River Delta fits to EKC? (2) How do urbanization, openness and energy consume affect environmental quality? (3) Does the overdevelopment of industrial affect environmental equality? (4) Why does state government priors economical growth to environmental protection?Paper answers above questions from the third chapter to the sixth chapter. In the first chapter, we research how change of industrial department affects environmental quality, and make empirical test. We fred that Shanghai's environmental quality fits to EKC hypothesis, and enters into phase of improvement. However, Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces don't fit to EKC. We find that the change of industrial structure plays important role in the improvement of Shanghai's environmental quality. In the 4 chapter, we analyze the effect of urbanization, openness, and energy consume. We find rapid urbanization will put heavier environmental pressure on Jiangsu and Zhejiang in the future. Manufacturing industry transformation will not help to improve environmental quality of Yangze River Delta. But there is no direct evidence that foreign pollution industries transform to Yangze River Delta. Non-reasonable energy structure and lower energy efficiency increase environment pressure. Overdevelopment of industry department worses environmental quality of Yangze River Delta: high pollution arrive at advance; pollution keeps on much more time. In the chapter 5, according to principal-agent theory, we research why local government neglects environmental protect. Due to information dissymmetry and huge environment information cost, central government has to provide local government encourage contract pursuing economic growth. As result, the superior strategy of the local government is to pay more attention to the economic growth, but neglect environmental protection. In the chapter 6, according to panel data, we comprehensively analyze three kinds of effects, we also make comparison research among 30 provinces. The research discovers that the economic growth speed and the second industry weight disadvantage the improvement of the environment quality, but the technique progress and the government environment policy strength play key role to the pollution control.