Research On The Relationship Between Economic Growth And Environmental Quality Of Chongqing

In recent years, with rapid economic development, environmental problemshappened frequently.“Soot-black air” has been swallowing whole cities on the Chinesemainland while many rivers and lakes have been seriously polluted. All of those revealthat the environmental problems caused by economic growth is becoming more andmore severe, which has been highly valued by the Party Central Committee and themasses and discussed in the national NPC and CPPCC. Since1997, Chongqing’seconomic growth and industrial process have a great development and the lives levelof people has enhanced greatly. Meanwhile, it is inevitable that contradiction betweeneconomic growth and environmental quality exists. Therefore, government andscholars focus on how to effectively reduce the environmental pollution anddestruction under premise of economic growth, how to improve the environment athigh level of economic development and how to realize sustainable developmentbetween economic growth and environmental protection.After collecting and analyzing many related literatures, this paper makes anempirical research based on the hypothesis of Environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) onthe relationship between Chongqing’s economic growth and the environmental quality,and then put forward the policy recommendations according to empirical results andChongqing’s conditions. The main conclusions of this paper are as follow:The economic data from Chongqing Statistical yearbook suggests that Chongqingachieved rapid economic growth as its second industrial output rose sharply and raisedpeople’s living standards during1997-2012. At the same time, environmental dataindicates that the overall situation of environment gets improved to a certain degree;however, the environment problem is still serious and can not be ignored.The result of Econometric analysis based on EKC model shows that: the curvebetween environmental pollution and GDP per capita is seeing as an inverted N shape,occurring, turning point in2002and2009respectively, which illustrates that the degreeof the pollution of the environment firstly increased, secondly decreased and thendecreased with economic growth; the relationship between ecological environment andGDP per capita presents a linear increasing trend; taken the environmental pollutionand ecological environment into consideration, the curve between environmentalquality and GDP per capita appears the right part of an inverted U shape, experiencedthe top point before1997, and has been falling. The regression results of C-D production function extended model show that the deterioration of the environmentquality will lead to economic growth decline. Conversely, the improvement of theecological environment has a good effect on economic growth.Through factor decomposition method and the qualitative analysis of factors ofEKC, it concludes that the main reason leading to Chongqing’s pollutant emissionsincreasing is scale effect caused by rapid economic growth, and the structure effectbrought by the optimization of industrial structure reduces environmental pollution to acertain extent and otherwise will get the environment worsen, while the techniqueeffect, the cross effect and the policy effect have positive effects on the improvementof environmental quality. Now, there are still so many problems of Chongqing’sindustrial structure, such as heavy industrialization, depending on heavily pollutingindustries, however, except industrial waste gas emission at two period of1997~2002and2002~2009, the deterioration of environment caused by the scale effect ofeconomic growth is always lower than the sum of the improvement of environmentcaused by he technique effect, the cross effect and the policy effect. So, Chongqing’spollution levels have dropped and EKC passed break point, which is the reason ofChongqing’s Environmental Kuznets Curve being inverted N shape and inverted Ushape.