Trade Openness and Environmental Pollution Management: Push or Pull?

Abstract

Foreign trade, as one of the troika of China's economic development, plays a vital role, bringing great benefits to the country through trade, but also accompanied by a series of environmental problems such as the export industry's carbon emissions increasing year by year and a series of environmental problems. Therefore, to explore the impact of trade openness on the environmental pollution control mechanism has practical and theoretical significance. Based on relevant theories and literature, this paper first combed through the mechanism of trade opening on environmental pollution and found the entry point. Then, based on the panel data of 30 provinces in China from 2007 to 2017, this paper explored the mechanism of trade opening on environmental pollution in the whole country and the eastern, central and western regions of China, and introduced technological innovation intermediary variables to build an intermediary model. The empirical results show that the relationship between the level of trade openness and industrial wastewater emissions is inverted "N", "U" with industrial sulphur dioxide emissions and negative linear with industrial soot emissions; trade openness will exert a mediating effect on environmental pollution control through technological innovation as a mediating variable.