Industrial Agglomeration And Environmental Pollution

With the rapid developments of economy in China,the environmental quality has becoming worse.The “2015 China Environment Bulletin” shows that 78.4 percent of cities are not up to the environmental standard,and many cities were included in the cancer village.Environmental problems are very serious.Industrial agglomeration as the driving force of economic growth,whose environmental pollution effects has attracted more attentions.Industrial agglomeration not only can improve the total energy consumptions by the scale effect,but also can improve production efficiency and reduce pollution emissions per unit of output by the economy effect,technology spillover effect and competition effect.Due to the spatial spillover effect of the environmental pollution,the traditional panel regression analysis has the endogenous problems seriously.Therefore we should analyze the effects of industrial agglomeration on the environmental pollution from the spatial correlation.Exploring the mechanism of industrial agglomeration on pollution has important practical significance for achieving sustainable developments.The paper uses panel data of Chinese 273 cities in prefecture level and above in 2004-2013 years.Based on the Copeland-Taylor model,the paper makes the theoretical analysis under the thinking from enterprise production decision and government decision,and gets a theoretical model of industrial agglomeration and pollution emission intensity.This paper tests the relationship between pollution emissions intensity and industrial agglomeration by using spatial lag model.The empirical results show that there are significant spatial spillover effects of industrial sulfur dioxide emission intensity and industrial wastewater discharge intensity.The pollution emission intensity of one city is significantly affected by the pollution emission intensity of surrounding cities.Therefore it is an effective way to reduce pollution and achieve sustainable development by strengthening the joint management of cities and promoting the effective allocation of resources.There are inverted U type relationship between industrial agglomeration and pollution emission intensity.When the industrial agglomeration level is low,the industrial agglomeration was positively related with pollution emission intensity,and agglomeration is bad for environment.When the level of industrial agglomeration exceeds a certain level,the positive externalities of industrial agglomeration began to show up.And with the level of industrial agglomeration increasing,pollution emission intensity will decrease gradually,and agglomeration can improve the environmental quality.To analyze the influence of industrial agglomeration on pollutant emission,based on the industrial agglomeration externalities as the breakthrough point,this paper studied the relationship between specialization externality,diversified externality and industrial SO2 emission intensity.Results show that there are U type relationship between specialization externality and industrial SO2 emission intensity.Now most cities? specialized agglomeration levels are on the right side.With the improvements of specialized agglomeration,industrial SO2 emission intensity increased gradually.Diversification externality is related to industrial SO2 emission intensity negatively,which significantly reduces pollutant emission intensity and is good for environmental quality.Thus reducing the specialized agglomeration level and improving the diversification agglomeration level are favorable choices in recent years.From the control variables,environmental regulation,technological innovation and population density are conducive to reduce the pollution discharge intensity;“resource” is not conducive to improve the quality of the environment.“Recourse curse” phenomenon still exists in China.There are not definite relationships between environment and FDI,so we should pay attention to guide FDI to clean industry and increase the introduction of high technology and play the positive externalities of FDI,such as technology spillover effect and demonstration effect.