Distinct exporters and the environment: Empirical evidence from China manufacturing

摘要

With the continuous advancement of economic interaction and vertical specialization in world economics, the importance of processing exports is catching up with ordinary exports. Although environmental consequences of export have been discussed from macro and micro perspectives, the effect of distinct exports, especially processing exports, on the environment at the plant level receives scant attention and remains unclear. To explore the firm-level environmental differences between processing exports and ordinary exports, in this paper we investigate how pollution emitted by individual establishments reacts to distinct export status by employing a panel of plant-level data from China manufacturing sector for the years 2006 and 2007. Our estimates indicate that exporters obtain both economic and environmental advantages over non-exporters, and processing exports generate fewer emissions than non-processing exports. For exporters, the beneficial effect of the decline in pollution intensity driven by the adoption of clean technology outweighs the negative effect of production expansion. Compared to non-processing exporters, processing ones have lower pollution intensity due to the inclination of abatement investments and the inclined inflows of FDI that bring advanced abatement technology to processing trade sectors. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.