Jiawei Zou

The development of the economy and the change of environmental quality have always been of concerned. This article uses the STIRPAT model (Stochastic Impacts by Regression on Population, Affluence, and Technology) (Dietz and Rosa 1978) to evaluate whether the economic growth and environmental quality will satisfy the Environmental Kuznets Curve relationship for 30 provinces and cities in China during the period of 1997-2016. That is, with the growth of the economy, environmental pollution in these cities will show a trend of increasing first and then decreasing. The empirical results show that both population size and economic growth have the suggested inverted U-shaped relationships with pollutants— sulfur dioxide and wastewater. At the same time, when checking different economic growth indication, it was also found that the increase of industrialization rate shares the same trend as economic growth. However, the urbanization rate shows a monotonous positive correlation with environmental quality, that is, the increase of urbanization rate will always increase pollutant emissions. Therefore, governments need to be aware of the inverted U-shape relationship between population size, economic growth and environmental quality, and pay more attention to controlling urbanization process as it will worsen the environment.