Studies on the Relationship between Environmental Pollution and Economic Growth in China

On the basis of the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis, this paper applies nonlinear methods to modeling and analyzing the relationship between environmental pollution and economic growth in China, with 29 Chinese provincial data of waste water, solid wastes and waste gas as environmental pollution indexes and per capita GDP as an economic growth index over the period 1989-2009. It is found that nonlinear methods is good in describing the environmental Kuznets curve. The results suggest that with the rise of per capita GDP, per capita waste water emission appears an inverse U-shaped relationship of first increasing and then decreasing, while per capita solid wastes generated and per capita waste gas emission take on the monotonously increasing relationships.