Foreign Trade, Economic Growth And Environmental Effect

The economy in our country has made remarkable achievements today, such as people’s living standards raised steadily, comprehensive national strength enhanced continuously, alone with the development of economic globalization and the deep step of reform and opening policies. Foreign trade, as one of the troika, has played an important role in developing China’s economic. While the environmental situation in China is not optimistic, the rapid development of foreign trade has also brought great environmental pollution, acid rain-prone in many areas because of the sulfur dioxide. Some of the major pollutant emissions even grow at an unusual rate, which is hundreds of times than1997in decades, far exceeding the bearing capacity of the environment. Recently, in the foreign trade, the other countries always make difficulties for china, using the so-called "green barriers""carbon tariffs" and other obstacles. These phenomena indicate that the conflicts between trade and the environment have been intensified. The "Twelve-Five plan", expressed in2011, noted that a reduction in resource consumption and setting new environmental industry is one of the focuses of Chinese Government in the next five years. The issue of "trade and environment" has been hot both at home and abroad. It is high time to find a way to coordinate the development of foreign trade and environment.This paper makes up for the mistakes that committed by previous scholars to study the relationship between foreign-trade and the environment. The author, using31provinces as studying object, construct a common panel EKC model, a extensive normal EKC model, a normal spatial EKC model, and a traditional extension EKC model and did a deep research in the topic of environmental effect by foreign trade based on the theory of EKC. The expansion models is made by adding several indices of the environmental effects of foreign trade, which is based on what Panayotou (2000) said. The extensive indices represent scale effect, technical effects, environmental regulation effects, structural effects and so on. The paper makes comparisons between these four kinds of models, and draw conclusions that whether environmental effect of the foreign trade exist spatial effect. Quantitative analysis of scale effect, technical effects, environmental regulation effects, and structural effects are also made in this paper. Conclusions are as follows:①in the general panel EKC model,the GDP per capital and environmental pollution showed an inverted U-shaped relationship, within sulfur dioxide emissions, industrial waste-gas emissions, emissions of industrial wastewater, solid waste, industrial dust emissions being dependent variables. In the extended panel EKC model, using sulfur dioxide emissions, industrial waste-gas emissions, industrial dust emissions as dependent variables, the GDP per capital and environmental pollution also showed an inverted U-shaped relationship. While the coefficients become less prominent for the industrial wastewater, solid wastes and industrial soot emissions. In the normal spatial EKC model, it is valid and sound to consider the spatial effect on the base of traditional EKC model because of the higher model fitting value and the significant P-value. Apart from industrial dust, the GDP per capital and environmental pollution also showed an inverted U-shaped relationship with other polluting emissions. For the extensive spatial EKC model, only two models with sulfur dioxide and waste gas emissions showed the inverted U-shaped relationship between GDP per capital and environmental pollutants. The other models’coefficients are no longer significant.②for industrial sulfur dioxide and waste-gas’s extensive models, the coefficients of environmental regulation indexes are positive, means that environmental regulation did not play a role in reducing environmental pollution. The other control variables showed various results with different pollution indices.In the last part of the paper, some comments and suggestions are made to build a coordinated development road among foreign trade and environment.The main contribution of this paper showed as follows:(1) empirical results expressed that environment Kuznets curve is fragile and variable, and it changes a lot with the data and the index. This helps follow-up scholars to do future research comprehensively.(2)The paper introduce spatial effect in the empirical analysis,this behavior has overcome the defect made by previous researches, and provides a new perspective to study the issue of environmental effect and foreign trade.