The relationships between industrial pollution intensity and economic growth based on intensity environment Kuznets curve: study on China’s pilot cities

Abstract

In order to enrich the study of Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) on pollution intensity, we analyze the relationship between industrial pollution intensity (pollution per GDP) and economic growth (GDP per capita) using data 1993–2012 from 46 Chinese pilot cities. Our study tracks seven types of industrial pollution intensity: wastewater, COD, waste gas, SO₂, soot, dust, and solid waste emissions. The relationship statistically follows two stages: industrial pollution intensity begets a rapid initial decrease with development of economy in the first stage and then the reduction rates gradually stabilized in the second stage. Such a curve is named IEKC (Intensity Environmental Kuznets Curve) in this paper. Power function model is suitable for quantitatively describing this hypothesis and a parameter from the model named elasticity coefficient of sustainability (ECS) is utilized for urban sustainability assessment. We find that China cities have a higher level of sustainability in the relationships between industrial wastewater, chemical oxygen demand (COD), dust, soot, and economic growth than the other three pollutants. ‘The after effect’ could be revealed from studying the relationship between ECS and economic development: cities at medium level of economic development usually have greater ECS values than developed ones because the former have learned the latter’s experience of political governance on economy–environment relationship and introduced mature/advanced pollution-controlling technologies.

Keywords:

• environmental Kuznets curve
• industrial pollution intensity
• sustainability
• the after effect
• China pilot city

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank seminar participants at School of Environment in Tsinghua University. The responsibility for any errors rests solely with the authors. We would also like to thank the National Key R&D Program (2012BAC15B01) and Commonwealth Program on Environmental Protection (201209039) of China Ministry of Environmental Protection for their generous supporting grant.