Urbanization And Industrial Pollution Of China: 1995-2005

Using the industrial pollution data of Chinese provinces from 1995 to 2005, this paper tests the variations of environmental quality during urbanization and industrial agglomeration of China. We find that, with advancement of urbanization, industrial pollution will experience an inverted-U shaped route that firstly rise and then turn down. This finding captures the threshold effect between urbanization and industrial pollution: before the threshold point of urbanization, industrial pollution will increase continuously, then, once it surpasses the point, industrial pollution will fall with persistent urbanization and industrial concentration. The contributions of this essay are twofold: First, we modify the common knowledge which takes the contradictions among urbanization, industrial agglomeration and industrial pollution for granted. In our dataset, some indexes of industrial pollution corresponding to urbanization are not at the threshold level, which illustrates the indispensability of durative urbanization and industrial agglomeration to reduce the industrial pollution. Secondly, based on the empirical results, we review and analyze some practical micro-level cases which both provide evidence for the theoretical assumption that increased returns to scale of pollution abatement can be achieved by concentrating pollutants, and conclude a strategy of marketization to pollution abatement.