Research On China’s Export Trade And SO₂ Emissions

Since initiating market reforms in 1978, China has experienced rapid economic development. It still maintains a 7% growth pace and continues enjoying huge development potential though there is a persistent worldwide economic recession since the subprime mortgage crisis from the U. S. in year 2008. However, many environmental issues, like air pollution, water pollution and garbage, appears along with the high-speed economic growth. Lower carbon emission may slow China’s development because China bases its great economic achievements on consumption of natural resource and serious environmental pollution. There is a strong correlation between carbon emission and economic growth referring to experience of developed countries. How to reach the coordinated development has become a quite popular topic for researchers around the world.SO2, a main element of fog and haze, is becoming an increasing breath hazard in recent years and is threatening human healthy. Large amount of SO2 emission not only pollute the environment but cause huge loss to our economy. According to official figures, acid rain coverage is annually spreading in China, and China has become one of the three world’s largest acid rain regions. Agroforestry experiences heavy losses, up to 120 billion because of acid rain. Proper control of SO2 emission has become an urgent need from both economy and environment perspectives. In recent years, reducing SO2 emission has been regarded as an important goal in pollution control.The industry output takes only less than 50% in national GDP value since the 20 th Century and it is still descending year by year. But the problem is: more than 70% SO2 comes from industry production. China has been the World’s Factory all the time, a large quantity of merchandised goods are consumed by natives and also exported to foreign countries. Huge trade surplus and extensive growth make China undertook the environmental cost for other countries. Therefore, it is particularly important to study the impact of exported industrial goods on SO2 emission, to analyze and improve our methodin dealing with economic development and environmental pollution.The second Chapter introduces nationwide development of trading and SO2 emission. It calculates, taking an environment based input-output method, the industrial SO2 emission in year 2007 and year 2010; qualitatively analyzes the effects of export industry to SO2 emission. It then discusses all factors contributing to changes in SO2 emission from three aspects: scale effect, structure impact and emission intensity effects. Finally, the passage proposes suggestions including improving energy consumption, developing technology, upgrading industrial structure, maximizing import and export composition and promoting SO2 emission trading.