• Environmental and Resource Economics Review
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.511-544
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• 2007

He purpose of this paper is to estimate environmental efficiency and grasp the relationship between trade and environmental efficiency for 61 countries. Furthermore, we examine the environmental Kuznets relationship between environmental efficiency and GDP per capita and 'pollution haven hypothesis' as well. This paper implies that trade-related variables such as trade composition, the share of polluting exports and openness of a country are important determinants of environmental efficiency and especially, we confirmed existence of 'environmental Kuznets curve' but could not accept 'pollution haven hypothesis' in that 'foreign direct investment (FDI)' improves the environmental performance of pensioner nations.

• Journal of Environmental Policy
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.71-91
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• 2011

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the environmental performance of 29 Chinese provinces by adopting the advanced measurements, integrated pollution intensity index, IPI, which can be computed using Data Envelopment Analysis(DEA) techniques. This index has the advantage of accounting for multiple resources used, good outputs produced and pollutants emitted simultaneously. The result obtained using the methodology shows the obvious evidence that provinces located around eastern area of China take relatively low levels and these phenomenons have been clearly observed throughout the sample period 1998~2007. The estimated index can be interpreted that the environmental burden in China has been steadily decreased as economic growth. This paper also tries to figure out the relationship among IPI, income levels, economic structures, the level of environmental regulations and FDI inflow. The estimated relationship between IPI and income per capita predicts improving environmental performance with increasing income levels. This explains the improvement in IPI which is simultaneously observed with income increases. According to the 'pollution haven hypothesis', many researches have been concerned the possibility that a large amount of foreign capital has been invested in China to avoid the strict environmental standards in advanced countries. However, the estimated coefficients in all model specifications take negative sign with IPI and highly statistical significant. This is a indication that there are positive impacts of foreign investments on IPI by adopting clean and high technologies from advanced countries.