Study On The Environmental Effects Of Manufacturing Trade In Zhejiang Province

In recent years, in-depth development of trade liberalization largelystimulates the development of national economies and improves thenational welfare of each trading countries. However, environmentalismtakes trade liberalization as the culprit of the increasingly seriousenvironmental problems, meanwhile, the relationship between trade andenvironment attracts high attention of the scholars.As an important province of China’s open economy, Zhejiang’sforeign trade is expanding at an average rate of28.8%each year,, theenvironmental situation in Zhejiang, however, is not that optimistic, theemissions of some pollutants are increasing year by year. Thus, we cannot help asking: whether the continuing expansion of foreign tradeincreases environmental pressure? What kind of impact does foreigntrade have on Zhejiang’s environment exactly?In this paper, we take the manufacturing trade in Zhejiang as anexample to study environmental effects of trade in this province. On thebasis of environmental input–output principle and previous study results,this paper uses authoritative statistics of trade and environment tocalculate the amount of waste water, waste gas and solid waste containedin Zhejiang’s manufacturing trade(exports, imports and net exportsincluded), as well as pollution terms of trade in it, by relatively maturecalculation model of pollutants contained in trade, the results show that: (1) During the investigation period, the amount of waste water,waste gas and solid waste contained in net exports in Zhejiang is abovezero. The result illustrates that there is a pollution surplus in Zhejiangprovince, and the comprehensive impact of foreign trade on Zhejiang’senvironmental is negative.(2) The pollution terms of trade of waste water, waste gas and solidwaste in Zhejiang’s manufacturing are below zero, the pollution intensityof exports is less than the imports, export products are “cleaner” thanimport products, Zhejiang is not specialized in the production and exportof pollution-intensive products, the hypothesis of "pollution haven" is nottenable in Zhejiang province.