Empirical study on the environmental pressure versus economic growth in China during 1991–2012

Since adoption of the policy of reform and opening-up in 1978, China has achieved spectacular success in economic growth, which mainly driven by abundant consumption of natural resources and resulted in serious environmental problems. Based on Emergy approach and Rescaled Range analysis, this paper aims to examine the decoupling condition in economic growth nexus environmental pressure both at specific and aggregate level and track the changing trend and the corresponding socio-economic cost in decoupling process. The results show that: the decoupling performance of waste emission (includes waste water, SO2 and solid waste) is better than energy consumption at a specific level which implies that the policies focused on end-of-pipe treatment has been succeeded in meeting the targets of emission reduction. But at aggregate level, the situation is opposite which suggest that China need more efforts in life-cycle management. The weak decoupling condition of resource use and waste water discharge may continue in the future, so as the strong decoupling condition of SO2 and solid waste, but for the aggregate environmental pressure induced by waste emission, the decoupling performance may be getting worse in the future. The investment cost of decoupling increased, whilst the job-cost of decoupling decreased. The decoupling performance can be influenced by environmental policies substantially, such as the polices of circular economy, rigorous emission reduction and waste recycling which have brought about the strong decoupling of SO2 emission and solid waste discharge from economic growth, whereas the less rigorous policies on resource exploitation and waste water discharge didn’t achieve the same result. Therefore, China needs to intensify the unity among various environmental policies.