Economic Analysis On China’s Sulfur Dioxide Pollution

China maintains sustained and rapid economic growth since its reform andopening up policy, but also suffers severely environmental damage over these years.Environmental pollution is a general concept which includes a variety of specificpollutants. China is the world’s largest emitter of sulfur dioxide, a very dangerousand the main atmospheric pollutant of China currently. Therefore this paper analyzesthe relationship between China’s economic growth and environmental pollutionthrough sulfur dioxide.Although we have a lot of literatures concerning the hot topic carbon emissionwith the worsening of global warming, what needs to be pointed out particularly is:carbon dioxide is greenhouse gas and has no immediate harm, therefore no severeconsequence will be suffered in the near future and it is a problem of allmankind; while the consequence of sulfur dioxide pollution is close at hand and wehave to suffer this by ourselves as sulfur dioxide is easily soluble in water, whichwill fall to the ground as acid rain. Since China’s trade share of GDP is increasing, itcan be said that other countries should also take their responsibility for carbonemissions to reasonably divide responsibility between producers andconsumers. However, the division of responsibility for the emission of sulfur dioxideis of no significance, because we will suffer this consequence before we have anysettlement with other countries. We are not trying to shirk any responsibility ofcarbon emissions here, but the control of sulfur dioxide pollution in China is moreurgent. This is the main motivation of this study.The main part of this paper consists of four chapters, and the main contents areas follows:1. Using environmental Kuznets curve as the analytical framework, weconstruct a model which includes more and reasonable explaining variables, to studythe relationship between China’s economic growth and sulfur dioxide pollution withChina’s provincial level sulfur dioxide concentration data except Tibet. We fit theenvironment Kuznets curve, calculate the GDP per capita at the inflection point,predict the future trend of the curve, and analyze the deep various factors affectingthe curve’s shape.2. China’s environmental pollution incurred many criticisms of the internationalcommunity, but such criticism didn’t take into account the level of economic development of China, and the developed countries themselves have a history ofserious pollution. In this paper, we use historical data of the developed countries andChina’s eastern rich provinces’ data of the past fifteen years, to compare the sulfurdioxide pollution of China and the developed countries at nearly the same level ofincome, to study the differences of “economic growth-environmental pollution”relationship between China and the developed countries, and to figure out thereasons behind this difference.3. After joining the WTO, China’s foreign trade continues to growrapidly. Because of China’s on-going surplus, and export has supported China’seconomic growth as an effective demand factor, we use input-output model todiscuss the impact of foreign trade on China’s sulfur dioxide pollution. And also weuse structural decomposition analysis to decompose the changes of pollutionembodied in trade into three effects, to analyze their effects’ size and change trendsalternatively, and offered some policy advices from trade policy.4. Although China has many trading partners, but several major partners’ tradevolumes accounted for the major part. There is no study of pollution embodied intrade by countries, so this paper discusses the flow of sulfur dioxide to differentcountries by using Trademap’s categorical data and input-output model, and figuresout which countries gain environmental benefits from China through trade, andcalculate the size of these gains and recent trends, and finally we make somecorresponding policy advises.Chapter3and chapter4focus on domestic policy adjustment, such astransformation of economic development, taking a new road toindustrialization. Chapters5and chapter6focus on external policyrecommendations, while chapter5emphasizes trade policy adjustments and chapter6emphasizes trade structure revision. Therefore, with the perspective of sulfurdioxide pollution, this article demonstrates the necessity of adjustment of China’seconomic development and taking a new road to industrialization from inside, andthe necessity of adjustment of policy and structure of trade from outside to ensuretaking all factors into account.The main innovations of the dissertation are as follows:1. Domestic studies based on environmental Kuznets curve are voluminous, butmost of the studies are problematic. Our model considers reasonable explainingvariables as more as possible, and the data chosing method we adopted describes theresearch object more compoetely, therefore our research is more standardized and the results are more accurate, which is fully demonstrated in Chapter3.2. Using the historic way of developed countries as the reference, we analizedthe economic growth-enviroment pollution path of current China, and studied thesimilarities and differences between China and developed countries, which can giveus a clear orientation and judgement of our economic growth model. While wehaven’t seen such comparative study of China’s pollution and that of the developedcountries, this paper has made a pioneering try.3. At present, most domestic research of pollution embodied in trade based oninput-output adopted RAS method, or estimated the input-output table firstly, thencomputed pollution emboded in trade. Obviously, such method led to big error. Theofficial input and output data are most reliable. By using the latest input-output dataof National Bureau of Statistics and China’s trade data of classification, this paperanalyzes trade’s impact on China’s sulfur dioxide pollution. Compared with otherdomestic research, this paper gets more accurate and reliable results.4. Domestic studies haven’t covered the pollution embodied in trade bycountries, but China’s trade concentration is high, so it’s necessary to discusse thesulfur dioxide embodied in trade of China’s main parters, which will offer somevaluable reference to our trade structure adjustment.5. Policy recommendations in Chapter7first proposed the concept of sulfurfootprints and sulfur labeling system, and the dissertation disigned an roughframework to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions in China. Finally, we pointed outsystematically and detailedly the problems of China’s environmental monitoring andreporting system so as to provide a valuable reference for further improvement ofenvironment statistics.