Impact Of Import Trade Liberalization On Pollution Emissions From Chinese Enterprises

Many countries actively participated in economic globalization and trade liberalization.However,although trade has created economic benefits,it also exerts unprecedented pressure on the natural ecological environment.The balance of trade and environment have been one of the most important issues of the current era.This article aims to construct the measurement of pollution emissions,import tariffs on intermediates and final products at the firm level.It is feasible to explore the impact of import trade liberalization on pollution emissions from a micro perspective,by using panel data from 2001 to 2010 which includes firm’s emissions,production,customs trade,and tariffs,These results show that the import trade liberalization will lead to an increase in firm’s pollution emissions.However,the impact of firm intermediate tariff and firm output tariff on firm’s emissions are completely opposite.Trade liberalization of intermediate import will aggravate pollution emissions,while trade liberalization of output import can reduce emissions.This research also uses industry-level tariff levels to replace firm-level tariff levels,or uses the lagging items of firm intermediate tariff and firm output tariff as instrumental variables,which confirm the robustness of this conclusion.This research also adds regional environmental regulations as adjustment variables into the benchmark model,which proves that strict and effective environmental regulations can effectively reduce firm’s pollution emissions.That is,strict and effective environmental regulation policies can weaken the pollution effect of intermediate trade liberalization,and at the same time strengthen the emission reduction effect of final products trade liberalization.In addition,this research builds a simplified model of enterprise heterogeneity about imports and emissions,based on Melitz(2003),Bustos(2011)and Halpern(2015).There might be four major mechanisms-scale effect—scale effect,technical effect,resource resetting effect and structure effect.Through empirical research,this research verifies that intermediate trade liberalization mainly increases pollution emissions by inducing scale and structural effects,while final products trade liberalization reduces pollution emissions by inducing resource replacement effects.The overall impact of import liberalization on pollution emissions should be determined by the positive and negative strengths of those four mechanisms.These conclusions also imply that during the first ten years of entering WTO,China has always implemented an unhealthy development model called ’Treatment after Pollution’.In recent years,China has rapidly become the country with the fastest growth in trade and economy.But at the same time,the deterioration of natural resources and environmental quality become the cost of rapid development.Therefore,this article puts forward policy recommendations from the government supervision level and the enterprise implementation level,trying to make a contribution to realize sustainable and coordinated development of trade and environment.