Environmental Pollution,Income Level And Residents’ Happiness

The report of the 19 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China pointed out that the main contradiction in our society has been transformed into a contradiction between unbalance and inadequate development and the people’s ever-growing needs for a better life.The contradiction between economic growth and environmental pollution has also become an urgent problem to be solved on the road of development in China.On the one hand,it is an indisputable fact that China’s income gap is too large and the development between regions is extremely uneven.On the other hand,environmental pollution problems in recent years,especially air pollution,have received great attention and attention from both the central level and all nationals.How to coordinate the relationship between the two is the prerequisite for China to achieve green development and shared development.Therefore,exploring the intrinsic relationship between economic development and environmental pollution has important practical significance for China’s development.In the past,the experience of economic development in most countries showed that with the improvement of economic development level,environmental pollution showed an upward U-shaped trend of rising first and then falling.This paper explores the causes of this phenomenon from the perspective of micro-individual happiness,and supplements the phenomenon of Easterlin paradox through the analysis of residents’ subjective well-being.This paper uses the 2016 China Labor Dynamics Survey Data(CLDS)and the air quality index data released by the environmental protection departments of China to introduce the economic development status,air pollution and the average subjective air pollution and happiness of residents in various regions.Then,it explains the related concepts of this paper and theoretically analyzes the impact of income level or economic development on residents’ subjective air pollution and their impact on residents’ happiness.It also discusses the differences in the impact of environmental regulation on the welfare of different residents.Finally,this paper empirically analyzes the relationship between residents’ income level,subjective air pollution and happiness through microdata.The paper analyzes the impact of residents’ income level on their subjective air pollution and the heterogeneity of subjective air pollution on the happiness of residents at different income levels.Based on the above analysis,the main conclusions of this paper are as follows: Firstly,the judgment of residents on the severity of air pollution is not only affected by objective air pollution,but also related to their income level.Specifically,under the same objective air pollution,high-income people have higher judgments on the severity of air pollution than low-income people.Secondly,subjective air pollution significantly impairs residents’ well-being,and this damage is exacerbated as income levels rise.The analysis in this paper shows that residents of different income levels have different environmental requirements,and high-income people have higher requirements for the environment.For low-income people,environmental pollution may mean employment opportunities and income growth.Therefore,they are not sensitive to the negative impact of environmental pollution.This provides a microscopic explanation for the environmental Kuznets curve,the inverted U-shaped relationship between economic growth and environmental pollution,which means residents in backward areas tend to develop the economy,while residents in developed areas tend to govern the environment.The higher sensitivity of middle-income and high-income groups to objective air pollution also provides a new explanation for the Easterlin Paradox.In addition to the loss of residents’ sense of well-being by objective air pollution,the highincome group’s “overvaluation” of air pollution also causes additional damage to happiness.According to the analysis results of this paper,with the problem of excessive income gap,imbalance between regions and environmental protection,this paper believes that there is an optimal way to achieve Pareto improvement of welfare among different groups,thus improving the overall happiness of our residents.The policy recommendations in this paper are to optimize environmental tax expenditures,increase consumer subsidies,and give full play to the central fiscal transfer payment function,giving greater help to underdeveloped areas to develop their economies in the protection of the ecological environment.