Empirical study on the structural and spatial difference between industrial pollutant emissions and economic growth in Yangtze River Delta Region

Abstract

The provinces and cities located in the Yangtze River Delta Region have different industrial structures, consume energy in different ways and emit different pollutants. Hence, pollution control in these places should be focused on different issues. Studies till date were focused primarily on time-sequence or panel association work on emissions of specific pollutants in a region, and their applications were relatively limited. This paper uses dynamic data of the Logistic model to analyze the research approaches, validating both the rising tendency of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) and the differences in industrial pollutants from different regions in Yangtze River Delta through the use of the polynomial model. The proposed counter-measures are helpful in alleviating the pollutant emissions in the Yangtze River Delta Region and controlling the pollutant emissions in a structured manner across the region. Results show that there is a structural and spatial difference between industrial pollutant emissions and its economic growth in the Yangtze River Delta Region, and that the curve fitting model yields different inflection points and convergence times. The fitting curves for the three models demonstrate that the relation of industrial waste water, waste gas and “3W” (i.e. waste water, waste gas and solid waste) index with the regional GDP per capita takes on an inverse N shape, while the solid waste is linearly related to the regional GDP per capita.