Foreign Trade, Economic Growth And Environment:A Comparison Between Brazil And China

Environmental effects of economic growth has been a research focus, especially when China’s rapid economic development during the last30years has pushed this issue to a very tight situation. However, though the similar economic growth with China Brazil has, the increase of its carbon emissions is very little. For developing countries, this is a breakthrough of economic-environmental relations. Why Brazil achieved a win-win relationship between economic growth and environment while China’s development caused great damage to environment? Is there any experiences we can learn from Brazil’s sucess? That is what we want to discuss in this paper.Therefore this paper starts with the descriptive analysis of the two countries’ environmental effects of economic and trade growth and finds the similarities in the scale of economic and trade growth and differences in structures. And then it does empirical analysis to discuss the relationship between the differences of growth and the differences of environmental effects(take carbon emissions as an example). Therefore, this paper uses VEC model, cointegration test, impulse response function and variance decomposition to do empirical study of the relations of economic development, industrial structure, foreign trade dependence, trade structure, energy consumption structure and carbon emissions based on the data from1984to2011.The results show that:(1) the economy of China and Brazil do have the environmental Kuznets curve, but the inflection point of Brazil will come earlier than that of China.(2) Brazil’s foreign trade dependence has a negative impact to its carbon emissions, while this impact of China is positive. This means the growth of trade will help to decrease Brazil’s carbon emissions while increase China’s.(3) the decrease in the proportion of industry will help reduce carbon emissions in the short term.(4) the more clean energy is comsumed, the less carbon emissions will be.Consequently, this paper recommends to adjust trade openness according to trade structure; to control industrial development, and vigorously promote the development of service industry and transform the pattern of economic growth; to encourage the research development of eco-friendly technologies; to perfect the legal system for environmental protection, promote environmental quality standard system, and strengthen the supervisionand punishment to pollution emissions.