How does population structure affect pollutant discharge in China? Evidence from an improved STIRPAT model
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
How does population structure affect pollutant discharge in China? Evidence from an improved STIRPAT model Li Cao 1 & Lin Li 1 & Yi Wu 2 Received: 15 April 2020 / Accepted: 20 August 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract China is the most populous country in the world, and the pollution caused by the excessive population should not be underestimated. In recent years, China’s population growth rate began to decline. Since 2003, the growth rate has dropped below 6‰, but the population base is still huge. This paper aims to study the influence of population structure on pollutant discharge. Using the improved STIRPAT model, we studied the panel data of 31 provinces from 2003 to 2017 to study the impact of population on pollutant discharge from the perspectives of gender, aging and urbanization. The results show that population affects pollutant discharge through three effects, among which gender effect and urbanization effect increase pollutant discharge, and gender effect has a greater impact on pollutant discharge than urbanization effect. But the aging effect helps to reduce pollutant discharge during the study period. The results also show that population size contributes to pollutant discharge in the east, west, and northeast. However, population size had no significant effect on pollutant discharge in the middle part. Therefore, it is necessary to consider the difference of population impact when making environmental policy effectively. Finally, some special issues are briefly discussed. Keywords Population structure . Pollutant discharge . STIRPAT model . China
Introduction China is now the most populous country in the world, with over 1.4 billion people. There are still a large number of overseas Chinese living all over the world, accounting for 21% of the global population. Nowadays, there are not a few countries with the same land area as China, such as the USA, Brazil, and Canada but the population is difficult to match China. In recent years, China’s population growth rate has begun to decline, falling below 6‰ since 2003. However, China still has a large population base, among which, gender, aging and proportion of urbanized population all have an impact on China’s economy and environment.
Responsible Editor: Philippe Garrigues * Yi Wu [email protected] 1
College of Economy and Trade, Hunan University, Changsha 410082, PR China
2
College of Environmental Science and Engineering, Hunan University, Changsha 410082, PR China
Meanwhile, Chinese urban air quality monitoring data in 2017 showed that the average PM2.5 concentration reached 4.3 times the World Health Organization standard (Li et al. 2019). Other soil and water pollution problems are also common and severe. These environmental problems not only affect economic development but also pose a significant threat to national health. China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection estimates that environmental pollution costs the country more than 3% of GDP each year. Therefore, it is necessary to
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