Green-production transitions and hazardous industrial discharge: A regional case study from China

Abstract

Green production, which reduces hazardous industrial discharges per unit output, is promoted throughout China. The Environmental Kuznets Curve suggests a negative correlation between hazardous industrial discharge and economic growth due to green innovation. This study expanded the EKC framework by including heterogeneity in evaluating the relationship between hazardous industrial discharges and economic growth to reflect green transformation. Administrative ranking disparity is identified as one of the fundamental driving forces of green production transition in a developing country. Building on an enriched EKC framework, we used a spatial estimation model to exclude spatial effects and obtained accurate estimates of the classified regions. The modified research method was used to examine whether industrial pollution has been reduced in 267 cities and towns in China from 2007 to 2021. Environmental protection performance was examined to estimate whether there is a switch to green manufacturing. As industrial hazards are of different types, the author sought to determine whether there was a decrease in industrial sulphur dioxide emissions, wastewater, solid waste, or dust, even though more industrial hazards were recycled than before. The spatial estimates indicated that (a) the national level of pollution remains positively linked with the total output, and every percentage of output growth increases sulphur dioxide emissions by 444.573 tons; (b) a positive relationship between economic growth and wastewater is altered by environmental protection in cities, while the general decoupling between economic growth and other types of industrial pollution, such as solid waste and industrial dust, was not observed; (c) growth in the southeast was decoupled from sulphur emissions, and its sulphur dioxide production per unit of output increased to 0.021 tons. Sulphur dioxide emissions per unit of economic growth along the southeast coast were 379. 048 tons, which was well below the overall average of 444.573 tons. High-income towns along the southeast coast have achieved clean production breakthroughs, realising a 15% reduction in industrial sulphur dioxide emissions by 2021. Although there were signs of a shift toward clean manufacturing in high administrative ranking cities, most regions of China are transitioning to environmentally friendly manufacturing and suffer from the hardships of green production transformation.

Special collections for applying artificial intelligence techniques to encourage economic growth and maintain sustainable societies

“…The tenth paper by Hou 10 builds an enriched Environmental Kuznets Curve framework to evaluate how changes in hazardous industrial discharge affect economic growth and green innovations from 2007 to 2021. The results indicate that the pollution level is significantly related to the total output, and for every 1% increase in production, approximately 444.6 tons of SO 2 would be emitted.…”

Redefining Economic Growth: the Review of Industry 4.0 and Industry 5.0 Progress

“…But, when the population reaches a certain income level, the growth in the economy facilitates environmental remediation at the stage of the Bank, 2022) demonstrates that the change from industry to services has already occurred in all countries with the highest GDP performance. Hence, the most developed countries will choose to exercise environmental preservation via the latest technological innovations to recoup the short-term loss of profit in economic greening (Hou, 2023).…”

“…The future of production and consumption is transformed into the mode of digital products and services, which can be consumed virtually (Goodfriend & McDermott, 2021). Regrettably, outside the locations accessible for high-tech knowledge spillovers via labor, ICT, and foreign investment, regional areas continuously employ low-tech industries and, therefore, miss the opportunity for technological transformation (Hou, 2023). Thus, an access to foreign investment and high-tech knowledge spillovers facilitates the reduction in CO2 emissions and enriches primary industry production through technological transformation, sustaining the economic development (Singh & Dhiman, 2023).…”