Water Pollution and Economic Growth in Western China

Chinese government has implemented the West Development Strategy since 1999 to boost the region's growth and prevent the environmental degradation. Until now, the regional economy and living standard in Western China have been greatly improved, while it also indicated by the State Council that the ecological environment still deteriorated with part improvement, and pressure of water shortage increased. The paper focus on the relationship of GDP per capita and the volume of industrial waste water discharge of all the 12 provinces in Western China from 1989 to 2004, by the expanded EKC model in the cubic form. Results show that they mainly have down trend in the whole sample space but small up trend in the recent years. That means controlling of industrial wastewater discharge is still an important task to be insisted in the Western China.