The Relationship Between Economic Development And Environmental Pollution In The Yangtze River Delta Region

The Yangzi River Delta is one of the most vigorous regions of China.In the past 20 years,Yangzi River Delta has witnessed economic growth miracle,nevertheless,struck in grave environmental issues.Yangzi River Delta used to realize rapid economic growth at the price of environmental losses,but now authorities and scholars become much more alerted for pollution issues frequently exposed.Economists started to study the relation of economic development and environment since 1990s.As an acknowledged result in the academic field,as the regional economy grows,local environment deteriorates before it gets improved.The rules of such kind are also known as Environmental Kuznets Curve(EKC).In the early 21th century,a group of economists represented by Brock and Taylor attempted to explain Environmental Kuznets Curve in terms of neoclassical economic frame.Based on the Green Solow Model put forward by Brock and Taylor,this paper tries to explain the relation between environment and economic development in the perspective of economic growth,industrial structure transformation,technological progress and trading structure.Based on the panel data of Yangzi River Delta from 1992-2015,the empirical results reveal that the emission of pollutants like sulfur dioxide,nitrogen oxides,dust and industrial water show an inverted U type with capita,which is consisted with Green Solow Model and EKC.Furthermore,judging from the coefficients of empirical result,the air pollution and waste water have already outperformed inflection point,indicating an environmental improvement period of the very region.The empirical results of FDI supported both the hypotheses of Pollution Heaven Theory and Pollution Halo Theory.The empirical results also found that the emission intensity of dust and industrial water show an inverted N type with capita,indicating a double humped curve with emission curve.Since emission intensity stands for technology progress in Green Solow Model,the empirical results also show that technique for sulfur dioxides and nitrogen oxides precede dust and waste water.Finally,we estimate the effect of technological progress and industrial structure.As the result shows,technological progress significantly reduced pollution emission intensity,and the estimation of technological progress is-0.152.And the estimation of technological progress is-0.150 when considering the influence of industrial structure,of which significantly improves emission intensity of 1.048.As a conclusion,we suggest strengthen emission supervision,upgrade the adjustment of industrial structure,properly utilize FDI,and increase environmental protection investment.