• Environmental and Resource Economics Review
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.135-166
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• 2005

This paper measures integrated pollution intensities and changes in pollution intensity, and figure out environmental performance. We introduce a new definition of pollution intensity and its method measuring integrated pollution intensities. We distinguish 24 manufacturing industries into light industry and heavy industry, and divide heavy industry into pollution industry and the other residual heavy industry to measure the integrated pollution intensities and their changes. While the pollution industry within heavy industry, based on the integrated pollution intensity, was the most pollution-intensive, the other residual heavy industry within the heavy industry was the most successive in reducing pollutants. The annualized average index of the integrated pollution intensities grew as much as 9.1 percent, of which the annualized change in the index of pollution emission increased 13.3 percent, but the improvement of 3.9 percent in the change of output quantity offset the increase in the index of pollution emission. The changes in the integrated pollution intensity for the light and heavy industries were 1.125 and 1.042, respectively. The reason the heavy industry showed the lower change in the index of pollution intensity, while the change in the pollution industry was very high, was because the average change in the other heavy industry decreased around 9 percent.

• 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.