Study on the pollution emission efficiency of China's provincial regions: The perspective of Environmental Kuznets curve

The Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) is an important tool to analyze the relationship between environment and per capital income. But two significant issues have been overlooked: why some points are above the EKC while others are below it? And what factors caused this phenomenon? Based on the data of 30 provinces in China over 2005-2016, this paper aimed to solve the above two questions. For the first question, we take the point on EKC as the theoretical pollution emission value of the different economic development stages; and use the difference between the theoretical pollution emission and the actual pollution emission under the same per capita income as the pollution emission efficiency. The difference value is used to reflect whether the pollution emission of the corresponding economic development stage of each region exceeds the standard and by how much. The result shows that most of the provinces with low pollution emissions concentrated in the north of the Yangtze River. Great progress has been made in China's pollution reduction work during 2015-2016. Then, for the second question, through the analysis of multiple mediating effects, we find that Environmental regulation, industrial transfer, proportion of output value of heavy pollution industry, energy consumption structure and energy using efficiency are important determinants to the pollution emission efficiency in Chinese province. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.