The Impact Of Home And Foreign Environmental Regulations On The Import And Export Trade In China

In today’s globalized background, the problem of how trade collaboratively interacts with environment is gradually becoming the subject of every country’s economic development, and even an unavoidable problem to China. Countries around the world and many international organizations such as WTO, CNUCED(United Nations Conference on Trade and Development), UNEP(United Nations Environment Programme) and so on set the environment and trade issues for their work agenda. Against this context, that how to harmonize the relationship between trade and environment and how to effectively solve the problem of environmental regulation barriers for China participating in the process of world economic integration has profound and far-reaching meaning to realize the sustainable development of economy and foreign trade, strengthen environmental protection and trade cooperation.From the perspective of ecological economics and focusing on the subject of environmental regulation and the import and export trade, this paper makes a thorough study on the trade effects of domestic, foreign and international environmental regulations on China’s import and export trade. Firstly we make a literature review on environmental regulations and trade home and abroad. Secondly it gives a simplified overview on environmental regulation and trade and analyzes environmental regulation theoretically. Then the paper shows the development of China, foreign and international environmental regulations to deeply explore the trade effects of environmental regulation. Thirdly, the paper carries out an empirical analysis of the actual import and export trade situation between China and trade partners. Finally, after the earlier analysis we come to the conclusion and then propose some policy proposals with guiding significance for the real world.The main conclusions presented in this dissertation are as followings:(1) The.significant positive correlation between domestic environmental regulation of China and import and export trade shows that it plays an obvious role in promoting trade as approved to a reality, in comply with the theory of Comparative Advantage.(2) Foreign environmental regulations have positive but not significant effect on our country’s export and significant negative effect on import. That may be because of the increase of living standard and environmental protection consciousness, consumers especially the developed countries’ need more and more ecological health imports and "Green Food" which urges enterprises to make technological innovation to stimulate more export trade from China. Besides, for the exporting country with strict environmental regulations, intensive energy consumption means higher production costs, so the export prices are higher which decrease imports.(3)As to the international environmental regulations, Kyoto and Montreal Protocol has obvious synergistic effect on our import and export trade; WTO has synergistic but not obvious effect; UNFCCC’s influences on import and export trade both are negative:significantly at the1%level on import and no significant influence on the export.(4) Both of import and export trade has significantly positive correlation with variables Mass as economic scale and Distance as transportation cost at the1%level, which means the bigger a country’s economic scale, the more trade; geographic distance is still one of the main obstacles to international trade even if transportations are becoming more convenient because of various means of transportation.(5)For multilateral trade resistance indexes:dumb variable Language is significant and positive; Similar is positive but not significant for export and not significant negative for import; Fact has significant positive effect on both import and export trade, but more significant on export. These show that when two traders share a common language, trade costs will decrease greatly and bilateral trade volume will increase significantly; The closer the level of GDP per capita, the more exports and the less imports of our country; The greater the difference of factor endowments, the bigger the import and export of bilateral trade.