China's Greener Production Reduces East-To-West Pollution Transfers and Alleviates Regional Environmental-Economic Inequalities

Abstract

Interprovincial trade has driven large air pollution flows, accompanied by significant regional environmental-economic inequalities in China. Past decades have seen the rapid economic development and air quality improvement in China, but the changes in interprovincial pollution transfers and the related inequalities are still unclear. Our results show that from 2007 to 2017, Chinese domestic consumption drives the national value added to rise steadily from 2.1 to 6.8 billion RMB, while the corresponding emissions first to increase from 46.6 Tg in 2007 to 51.2 Tg in 2012, and then to fall sharply to 29.9 Tg in 2017. Consumption in the sector construction contributes most to the emissions with the proportion of contribution increasing during the studied decade. Eastern provinces, as environmental-economic beneficiaries, tend to see net emission inflows, and the east-to-west emission transfer is substantially reduced by 2/3 during 2007–2017. In contrast, the number of Western provinces suffering from environmental-economic loss has decreased, and some even transform into achieving environmental-economic win. Greener production is the dominant factor of the reduced emission flow, resulting in the alleviated regional environmental-economic inequalities. For further air quality improvement and regional inequality alleviation in China, we suggest improving pollution responsibility sharing mechanism and strengthening regional cooperation on pollution mitigation.