An empirical correlation mechanism of economic growth and marine pollution: A case study of 11 coastal provinces and cities in China

The purpose of this study is to comprehensively measure the periodicity of the internal correlation mechanism of economic growth and marine pollution in coastal provinces and cities in China. In this paper, we constructed a model to measure the economic growth and marine pollution system. The characteristics of the system in various provinces and cities were calculated using the nonlinear Markov growth regime switching model. This model can successfully eliminate an infeasibility problem encountered in the traditional vector autoregression model. The empirical results demonstrate nonlinear characteristics of the economic growth and marine pollution system. The system contains two different growth regimes: the low-speed and high-speed growth regimes. Moreover, each coastal province or city under study demonstrates nonlinear periodic variations, with some regions showing more frequent shifts and others showing more stable. Finally, different coastal provinces and cities demonstrate various attributes when shifting between growth regimes. The transfer attribute shows that coastal provinces and cities tend to evolve toward coordinated and symbiotic development in economy and marine ecological environment. The findings highlight the need to further strengthen coastal provinces' and cities' policy recommendations on differentiated sustainable development.