The Economics Of Air Pollution In China

Suffocating smog regularly envelops Chinese metropolises from Beijing to Shanghai, clouding the future prospect of China's growth sustainability. Air pollutants do not discriminate between the rich and the poor, the politician and the "average Joe." They put everyone's health and economic prosperity at risk, creating future costs that are difficult to calculate. Yet many people, including some in China, are concerned that addressing environmental challenges will jeopardize economic growth. In The Economics of Air Pollution in China, leading Chinese economist Ma Jun makes the case that the trade-off between growth and environment is not inevitable. In his ambitious proposal to tackle severe air pollution and drastically reduce the level of so-called PM 2.5 particles—microscopic pollutants that lodge deeply in lungs—Ma Jun argues that in targeting pollution, China has a real opportunity to undertake significant structural economic reforms that would support long-term growth. Rooted in rigorous analyses and evidence-based projections, Ma Jun's "big bang" proposal aims to mitigate pollution and facilitate a transition to a greener and more sustainable growth model.

How individuals and the government are changing life in China's polluted cities Over the past thirty years, even as China's economy has grown by leaps and bounds, the environmental quality of its urban centers has precipitously declined due to heavy industrial output and coal consumption. The country is currently the world's largest greenhouse-gas emitter and several of the most polluted cities in the world are in China. Yet, millions of people continue moving to its cities seeking opportunities. Blue Skies over Beijing investigates the ways that China's urban development impacts local and global environmental challenges. Focusing on day-to-day choices made by the nation's citizens, families, and government, Matthew Kahn and Siqi Zheng examine how Chinese urbanites are increasingly demanding cleaner living conditions and consider where China might be headed in terms of sustainable urban growth. Kahn and Zheng delve into life in China's cities from the personal perspectives of the rich, middle class, and poor, and how they cope with the stresses of pollution. Urban parents in China have a strong desire to protect their children from environmental risk, and calls for a better quality of life from the rising middle class places pressure on government officials to support greener policies. Using the historical evolution of American cities as a comparison, the authors predict that as China's economy moves away from heavy manufacturing toward cleaner sectors, many of China's cities should experience environmental progress in upcoming decades. Looking at pressing economic and environmental issues in urban China, Blue Skies over Beijing shows that a cleaner China will mean more social stability for the nation and the world.

This book systematically analyzes how and why China has expectedly lost and then surprisingly gained ground in the quest to solve the complicated environmental problem of air pollution over the past two decades. Yuan Xu shines a light on how China’s sulfur dioxide emissions rose quickly in tandem with rapid economic growth but then dropped to a level not seen for at least four decades. Despite this favorable mitigation outcome, Xu details how this stemmed from a litany of policy stumbles within the Chinese context of no democracy and a lack of sound rule of law. Throughout this book, the author examines China’s environmental governance and strategy and how they shape environmental policy. The chapters weave together a goal-centered governance model that China has adopted of centralized goal setting, decentralized goal attainment, decentralized policy making and implementation. Xu concludes that this model provides compelling evidence that China’s worst environmental years reside in the past. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Chinese environmental policy and governance, air pollution, climate change and sustainable development, as well as practitioners and policy makers working in these fields. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9780429452154, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This report provides a comprehensive assessment of the economic consequences of outdoor air pollution in the coming decades, focusing on the impacts on mortality, morbidity, and changes in crop yields as caused by high concentrations of pollutants.

How well air and water pollution regulation is implemented depends very much on both the level of economic development and the actual environmental quality. Pollution pricing is closer to the dictates of environmental economics than China's formal regulatory statutes would suggest, and there is considerable scope for using economic instruments to reduce China's industrial pollution problems.

A groundbreaking U.S.–Chinese inquiry into the effects of recent air pollution controls and prospective carbon taxes on China's economy and environment. China's carbon dioxide emissions now outstrip those of other countries and its domestic air quality is severely degraded, especially in urban areas. Its sheer size and its growing, fossil-fuel-powered economy mean that China's economic and environmental policy choices will have an outsized effect on the global environmental future. Over the last decade, China has pursued policies that target both fossil fuel use and atmospheric emissions, but these efforts have been substantially overwhelmed by the country's increasing energy demands. With a billion citizens still living on less than $4,000 per year, China's energy and environmental policies must be reconciled with the goals of maintaining economic growth and raising living standards. This book, a U.S.–Chinese collaboration of experts from Harvard and Tsinghua University, offers a groundbreaking integrated analysis of China's economy, emissions, air quality, public health, and agriculture. It first offers essential scientific context and accessible summaries of the book's policy findings; it then provides the underlying scientific and economic research. These studies suggest that China's recent sulfur controls achieved enormous environmental health benefits at unexpectedly low costs. They also indicate that judicious implementation of carbon taxes could reduce not only China's carbon emissions but also its air pollution more comprehensively than current single-pollutant policies, all at little cost to economic growth.

This book contributes to the understanding of environment–economy relations from the perspective of economic geography, grounded in the institutional context of China. It demonstrates how classical economic geographies, new economic geographies, and geographies of economic globalization work together to affect the environment. It covers a series of classical topics like industrial location and industrial dynamics and some emerging fields like industrial evolution and global–local interaction and links them to environmental performance in China. The findings in this book echo the call for developing a more comprehensive and systematic research agenda of environmental economic geography. This book offers researchers, graduate students, and advanced undergraduate students in related fields both theoretical and practical considerations of environmental economic geography. It also offers insights into the policy-making relevant to China’s greening efforts.

Essay from the year 2013 in the subject Business economics - General, grade: 1,3, University of Applied Sciences Kufstein Tirol, language: English, abstract: This written assignment is concerned with the economic boom in China and its negative side effects. After a short introduction about the economic development in China, the types of pollutions and the changes are going to be explained. There will be a schedule of the most significant pollution-types and an explanation what China actually does against the environmental pollution. Afterwards there will be a statement about the future prospects. At least a resume about all those facts in form of a conclusion takes place. In the year 2010, China replaced Japan as the second largest economy in the world. The Chinese economy has continued to grow strongly in recent years and even during the global economic crisis. Nevertheless, the economic boom in China has also had negative side effects. There are continual negative headlines about the environmental pollution in China.