Judith Dean

Column for VoxEU, the online scholarly communications publication of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR).


The sheer scale of China's recent trade growth and its environmental degradation are unprecedented.1 In current dollars, the value of China’s exports plus imports rose from $280.9 billion in 1995 to $1422.1 billion in 2005 – a growth of over 400%. Meanwhile, there are almost daily media reports of Chinese rivers and lakes poisoned by pollution and algal bloom, water tables dropping too low to meet basic needs, farmlands tainted by industrial pollution and fertilisers, and cities choking on smog. While major improvements have been made in pollution regulation since the mid-1990s (OECD, 2005), and some progress has been made in achieving cleaner water and air, China’s own State Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) recently stated that, “[r]elative shortage of resources, a fragile ecological environment and insufficient environmental capacity are becoming critical problems hindering China’s development” (SEPA, 2006). Thus, it is no surprise that China's experience has fuelled the popular view that trade growth is harmful to the environment.