An Empirical Analysis on the Impact of Technical Innovation to the Environmental Quality

摘要

The relationship between technical innovation and environment quality is very complex: some scholars argue that technical innovation contributes to the improvement of environmental quality, others have different ideas and suggest that it accelerates the deterioration of environment. In this paper, we take the well-known decomposition model which was put forth by Grossman, and analyze the impact of technical progress on the environmental quality. We obtain the conclusions: In most years, technical innovation tends to reduce the industrial polluted water, on the one hand; and it tends to promote the discharge of emissions, on the other hand. Scale effect can reduce the pollution to some extent, but its impact is too small to change the decreasing tendency of environmental quality.