Shen, Z., 2020. Coordinated environment and economy in coastal development based on industrial wastewater and SO2 emissions. In: Wan, Z. (ed.), Coordinated Sustainable Development in Coastal Areas: Environment and Economy. Journal of Coastal Research, Special Issue No. 109, pp. 13–18. Coconut Creek (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208.
China's coastal areas have achieved great economic growth since the reform and opening up, but at the same time, there has been increasing concern about environmental damage. Many theories hold that economic development has caused great damage to the environment, while environmental protection will also make economic development stagnate. Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) puts forward an inverted U-shaped relationship between economic development level and environmental degradation, that is, when economic development reaches a certain degree, continuous growth can improve the environment quality. In this paper, a reduced-form VAR model is used to analyze the EKC relationship about three major coastal developed cities in China: Shanghai, Tianjin, and Shenzhen. Industrial wastewater discharge and sulfur dioxide emissions are used to reflect environmental indicators. Through analysis, it is found that the industrial wastewater index of Shanghai and the SO2 emission index of Tianjin both conform to the inverted U-shaped relationship of EKC curve, and the reaction of industrial wastewater to the industrial electricity consumption of Shenzhen and the reflection of SO2 to GDP also conform to this relationship.
