The Empirical Analysis Of The Effect Of Chinese Industrial Export On The Environment

With the development of the world economy and the rise of the global environmental protection, the issues of trade and the environmental are increasingly concerned by the international community, governments and people all over the world. It has become one of the focal points in international political and economic fields.Since China's opening up reform in 1978, foreign trade has developed rapidly. The development of foreign trade increased China's economic dependence on foreign markets. Today, with the rapid expanding of foreign trade and industrialization, China's environmental problems are also very prominent. Then what is the relationship between China's industrial exports and the quality of the environment?Employing the method of theoretical and empirical analysis, on the base of analyzing the relationship between trade and the environment, the author analyzes the influence of the Chinese industrial export on the environment. The author also draws some inspirations from the international cases. The author holds that: Freer trade has made a significant positive contribution to Chinese environment. It enabled China to specialize according to its comparative advantage and relocate its resources away from capital, land and energy intensive dirty industries to labor intensive cleaner industries. It also enabled China to gain access and adopt the best international practice in pollution abatement technology leading to a significant drop in the pollution intensity of its manufacturing industry. Nonetheless, China's experience also shows that the scale effects of trade liberalization on the environment overwhelmed other sources of pollution change and offset other environmental gains from specialization and increased access to international best practice in pollution control. As a result, over the last two decades, water, air and soil pollution has expanded at a rate not very dissimilar to that of manufactured exports.