A Study On The Influence Of Income Disparity On The Environmental Efficiency Of China

World Business Council for Sustainable Development(WBCSD)define Environment Efficiency which meant in the optimal conditions that meet the demand for high quality life and make the impact on resources and environment of the whole life cycle decrease to the level of bearing capacity of the earth.Environment Efficiency is a good index to reflect the relationship between economy and environment.Income disparity and environmental pollution are important problems we encountered,and there is a great significance to promote Chinese coordinated development of economy and environment by analysis the relationship between them.When dealing with Environment Efficiency,Data envelopment analysis(DEA)is a common way to solve the question of multiple input and multiple output.With the development of DEA,Tome proposed a slack-based measure of efficiency in data envelopment analysis which called SBM model.First,this paper measure the Environmental Efficiency of the provinces(municipality and municipalities directly under the central government)in China based on undesirable output SBM model.Find that the eastern area such as Beijing Shanghai Tianjin have a higher Environmental Efficiency,while the efficiency of the west area such as Yunnan Shanxi Xinjiang is lower.This has a large degree between the economic development of eastern and western regions.Then we use Theil's entropy measure to calculate the Theil index of 30 Chinese provinces(municipality and municipalities directly under the central government)and get that the income gap of our country is gradually widening in recent years.High-income people pay more attention to their quality of life,they can buy air purification equipment and other equipment which can improve their living environment to reduce their environmental hazards.While low-income groups don't have enough money to buy these equipment,so they have to suffer more environmental hazards.Then their living quality will be impact and their working efficiency will be lower than high-income groups.Also,they are more concerned about the economy than in the environment,and it is a bad news to environmeatal protection.At last,we use tobit model to study the income disparity influence on Environmental efficiency,and get that except technical factors,economic factors and regional factors have a positive effect on environmental efficiency,income disparity has a negative relationship with environmental efficiency.So narrowing the income gap helps to improve the environmental efficiency of our country.So we should take into account narrowing the income gap in the process of promoting the coordinated development of economy and environment.Public would pay more attention to environmental protection when income disparity is shrinking.Allow the public to consciously safeguard the environment can ease the pressure on the government and can effectively improve the efficiency of environment.Therefore decision makers should consider the income gap factors,technology factors,economic factors,regional factors and government regulation factors to deal with the issue of economic development environmental governance.And we should pay more attention to the west development in the future.