Decoupling Analysis on the Relationship Between Economic Development and Environment Degradation in China

Abstract

In recent 20 years, the dramatic economic development in China has also triggered a number of environmental problems such as fast-growing of resource consumption, air pollution, soil erosion and water pollution. This unsustainable economic development pattern will gradually become the bottleneck and impede the further development of the Chinese economy. Therefore, the relationship between economic development and environment degradation in China has been studied by various researchers. This paper adopts the decoupling factor introduced by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to investigate the decoupling level between economic growth and environment degradation in China during the period of 1990–2010. This paper concludes that the environment degradation has been gradually improved whilst the good level of economic development has been sustained.