A Research On The Impact Of Foreign Trade Upon China's Environment

With the economic globalization and trade development, environment pollution and resource shortage has become worse than ever before. The social society pays more and more attention to whether the trade liberalization has caused environment quality deterioration. The rapid development of Chinese foreign trade placed great pressure to environment and resources in recent years. How to make sure the smooth development between foreign trade and environment quality becomes a critical task for Chinese government.This paper analyses the influence in environment made by trade liberalization and the reasons for trade causing trade quality deterioration, and explores the solutions to the conflicts between foreign trade and environment quality. This paper is divided into five chapters, including theory introduction, empirical analysis, reasons exploration and disposal providing.Chapter One and Chapter Two tell the background, significance of this paper, put forwards the researching approaches and framework, as well as the innovations and insufficiencies, and then review the related literature, summarizing the main economic theories and analysis in the relationship between trade and environment.Chapter Three uses regression analysis, co-integration analysis and Granger causality test to study the impact of foreign trade upon environment quality, and the results of analysis indicate that the rapid increasing of foreign trade, especially the trade of industrial products puts a heavy load on environment and resources; Chapter Three analyses trade data for the 26 industries, and calculates the coefficients of pollutant emission intensity and terms of trade to verify the impact of trade on environment quality, and the results show that foreign trade in different industries places different influence on environment, dependent upon pollutant emission intensity and trade volume in different industries.Chapter Four points that the unreasonable international division of labor and trade structure causes the negative influence of trade upon environment quality from three aspects:trade structure, industry structure and investment structure. The reasons for negative influence by foreign trade on environment quality include pollution-intensive industry shift, the export of goods consuming lots of energy and materials and the import of industrial refuse and household refuse.Chapter Five provides effective solutions for realizing co-development between foreign trade and environment protection, including improving environment protection standard, optimizing trade structure and interiorizing environment cost and so on.This paper reminds policy-makers that they should take into account the environmental effect of trade when making polices for promoting foreign trade, especially for promoting the foreign trade of industrial products. Optimizing both trade structure and industry structure is an effective way to realize the sustainable development between foreign trade and environment quality.