Research On The Environmental Impact Effects And Green Development Of China's Foreign Trade

At present,global climate change and its response has attracted worldwide attention.The process from the first world climate conference in 1979,to the “Paris agreement" coming into force in 2016,highlights that the global climate governance has increasingly become the consensus of the international community.With the growing awareness of environmental protection,the relationship between international trade and environment has increasingly become the focus of attention.From China's perspective,thanks to nearly forty years of reform and opening up,the economy and social development have made great achievements,and foreign trade has played a significant role in those achievements.But at the same time,the problem of resource exhaustion and environmental pollution have become increasingly prominent in China,resulting in greater pressure to the domestic ecological environment,and to the international climate negotiations,which requires China to undertake more greenhouse gas emission reduction obligations.So far,China has made unremitting efforts,and established "the Five Principles of Development" that includes "Green Development" and "Open Development",which has become the core guiding principles of the 13 th Five-Year Plan for Economic and Social Development of the People's Republic of China.The transformation of economic development is the inevitable trend of the time.Therefore,it is important to have a comprehensive and correct understanding of the relationship between China's foreign trade and the environment,and clarify the influence of green development orientation on foreign trade,in order to achieve growth of trade and economic development on the one hand,and environmental improvement on the other hand.The goal is to achieve better development in China,and to build a community of human destiny on the basis of maintaining its own legitimate rights.This dissertation tries to answer some of these problems.After surveying relevant literature in China and abroad,this dissertation takes multiple angles and different research methods to study theoretical and empirical questions.Key research questions include the environmental impact of China's foreign trade,the embodied pollution from foreign trade,the trade embodied pollution in added value with major trading partners,and lastly the coupling and promotion problem of “open development and green development".This research finally puts forward the feasible policy suggestions accordingly.Main contents and research conclusions in this dissertation are as follows:First of all,this dissertation reviews research on trade and environmental pollutions problems,and summarizes the effect and its mechanism of foreign trade on environment,which provides a theoretical basis for the following research.Second,this dissertation collects data on the basic situation of China's foreign trade and environmental pollution,and describes the relationship and its changes between foreign trade and the environmental pollution with statistical data.Results show that,on the absolute value,China's foreign trade and the environment pollution grow synchronously;secondly,the production for foreign trade is better than the domestic counterpart in China in conserving resources and protecting the environment.Thirdly,this dissertation dives into the environmental pollution of China's foreign trade from two perspectives: the quantative effect of China's foreign trade on environment,and the embodied pollution of foreign trade.On the level of the foreign trade effect on environment,this dissertation conducts empirical analysis based on both time series data and provincial panel data.The results confirm the existence of long-term and stable cointegration relationship between China's foreign trade development and pollution emission.The foreign trade effect on environment is then decomposed into scale,structure,openness and technology effects.For scale effect,the expansion of China's foreign trade has promoted the economic growth,but also increased pollution emissions,while pollution emissions to a certain extent will decline,which verified the Environmental Kuznets curve;for structure effect,the increase of China's capital labor ratio in a certain period of time does not make environmental pollution worse,but has the industrial structure shifted towards cleaner industry,so pollution emissions did not rise but fall;for openness effect,increasing trade openness will reduce industrial wastewater,while increase industrial waste gas emission;lastly,for technology effect,technological progress plays a positive role to improve the quality of the environment.On the level of the embodied pollution of foreign trade,the analysis is carried out using a single-region competitive input-output table and a multi-region noncompetitive input-output table.For the former,the embodied pollution emission in foreign trade is estimated at the total level and the industrial level,and the embodied pollution balance and ecological deficit are combined.After that,the SDA method is used to decompose the factors that affect the embodied pollution emission of foreign trade.Results show that the intensity of "three wastes" emissions from industrial sectors in China has been significantly improved,and the relevant import and export of embodied pollutants have increased first and then decreased,indicating that the environmental pollution caused by foreign trade worsened before improved.The foreign trade in the field of industrial wastewater is accompanied by "ecological deficit",which is not conducive to the environment quality improvement,and other types of pollution is accompanied by "ecological surplus" which is beneficial to the environment quality improvement.SDA factor decomposition shows that export,import and the scale effects are positive,indicating that trade expansion is the main reason behind the foreign trade embodied pollution increasing;technology effect is negative,and it shows that the improvement of industry pollution emission coefficient is the most important factor to prevent the foreign trade embodied pollution discharge from increasing;structure effect on the embodied pollution plays a positive or negative role in different years and for different pollution indicators,and the degree of influence is relatively small.Using the multi-region noncompetitive input-output model,this dissertation introduces the international value-added trade accounting system to eliminate the possible overestimation of gross trade.Aggregating the eight pollutants in the environmental account table of WIOD database,it estimated the embodied pollution of added-value foreign trade between China and its five major trading partners,which includes the United States,Japan,Korea,Taiwan,Germany,and the factors affecting the changes are decomposed and studied.The results show that,China bear greater environmental costs for its main trade partners,and there is an obvious "ecological deficit".The embodied pollution of added-value exports to major trading partners were increased and then gradually stablized,while the embodied pollution of added-value imports were growing over the same period.From the point of view of pollution terms of trade,China's environmental pollution pressure behind the trade with major trading partners is large,but the per unit embodied pollution of both import and export has a relatively continuous tendency to improve.The main sectors of the largest net embodied pollution,between exports and imports in added-value,are electronic and optical equipment sector,textile and leather and its products sector,basic metals and metal products sector,etc.The SDA decomposition reveals that,for both exports and imports,the technical effect is negative,the structural effect is uncertain and the total effect is all negative,indicating that the per unit embodied pollution of exports and imports in value-added is falling.In addition,based on the study of the foreign trade effect on environment,this dissertation discusses the coupling relationship between open development and green development,analyzes the foundation and transmission mechanism of this coupling relationship,and puts forward some ideas to promote the development of open and green coupling and advancing from the perspective of political economics.This dissertation holds that there is a clear dialectical unity and a mutually reinforcing relationship between open development and green development,which constitutes the basis of coupling the two,and international trade and investment constitute the transmission mechanism of this coupling relationship.In order to achieve open development and green development coupling promotion,theoretical premise is needed that the hypothesis should change from the "economic man" to "ecological man",the relationship between human and nature needs to be adjusted to achieve the dialectical unification of production relations and productive forces;both the mode of production and the way of life need to become green together.Finally,after summarizing the basic viewpoints and conclusions above,this dissertation puts forward relevant policy recommendations on reducing the negative impact on environment of China's foreign trade.It argues that we should strengthen the green development concept in all aspects,and adhere to the basic national policy of opening up for the long term.We should accelerate the green transformation of domestic production,consumption and foreign trade,strengthen the use of environmental regulation,legal and economic means,and continue to participate actively in relevant international cooperation.At last,this dissertation makes a prospect of further research.