The developing world is in the midst of an environmental crisis. Simply breathing the air is a leading cause of death. One recent study found that pollution is to blame for a fifth of sub-Saharan Africa’s infant deaths.
Another showed that exposure to toxins or other dangerous substances in the air killed over 9 million people in 2015 alone, with 92% of those deaths occurring in developing countries – this is more people than were killed by AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined in that same year.
In Latin America, over one-third of deaths from lung cancer, stroke and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease were estimated to stem from air pollution in 2012.
There are many reasons behind these troubling trends, but one looms especially large: China’s booming economy. Not only has this created an environmental crisis in China itself, but the nature of its trade with developing nations threatens their air, water and soil as well.
Over the last decade, China has become the biggest trade partner to continental Africa and to several countries in Latin America, homes to some of the world’s poorest people. At the same time, air pollution has surged in many of these countries, especially in Africa.
Are these two trends linked? My new study published in June tries to answer that question. I also wondered, could a country’s governing institutions make a difference?
Most economists agree that trade helps generate economic growth and development. Unfortunately, these benefits often come with costs, such as environmental degradation.
Developing countries are especially susceptible to this side effect because they often export pollution-intensive goods like fossil fuels and metals and have weak environmental regulations.
Western governments have increasingly been pushing developing countries to protect their environments via trade agreements. NAFTA, for example, was the first United States trade agreement to include legally binding environmental conditions – something that is now a standard element.
A similar trend occurred in Europe, where binding environmental provisions became fixtures in trade agreements around 2006.
In contrast, China does not push its partners to strengthen environmental protections. For this reason, trading intensively with the world’s second-largest economy is especially likely to generate high levels of pollution in developing countries.
Trade and pollution
Against this backdrop, I investigated whether trade with China affected sulfur dioxide emissions and environmental illnesses in 58 Latin American and sub-Saharan African countries from 2001 to 2010.
To capture how intensively they trade with China, I measured sample countries’ trade volume in U.S. dollars as a share of their gross domestic product.
I then conducted statistical tests to determine whether this measure of trade correlates to two relevant indicators of pollution: sulfur dioxide emissions and a measure of environmental public health developed by researchers at Yale. I also controlled for a series of other variables to isolate the relationship between trade and pollution.
My findings show that pollution levels of many developing countries rose in tandem with trade to China – but not all of them.
Interestingly, the environmental impact of trading with China appears to depend on the characteristics of countries’ governments. Those countries with high quality of governance, as measured by researchers at the Quality of Government Institute, did not experience heightened air pollution or environmental illness when they traded at high levels with China.
In countries with strong governance, such as Chile, Gambia and Tanzania, which scored near the top of my sample, trading with China had little impact on sulfur dioxide emissions and environmental public health.
On the other hand, trading intensively with China worsened the air quality in countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia and Paraguay, which all ranked among the worst in governance.
How to fix it
The good news is that my research shows that China’s impact can change. In two ways.
One is by finding ways to improve governance in the developing world. Governance quality encompasses bureaucracy, law and order and transparency. Countries with stronger bureaucracies can manage a multipronged policy agenda that promotes trade while protecting the environment.
Governments capable of ensuring law and order are able to enforce environmental rules and regulations. Transparent institutions reduce opportunities for corruption that undermine efforts to protect the environment, such as bribery of public officials.
Collectively, these features of good governance protect countries’ environments and offset negative impacts that would otherwise be generated by trading intensively with China.
At the same time, China could change its ways and do more to push for stronger environmental laws abroad. Western countries tend to do this already because of lobbying efforts by both environmentalists and producers that compete with Mexican firms, who fear being at a competitive disadvantage if developing countries have weak environmental laws.
As wages continue to grow in China, the Chinese government will face similar pressures from domestic producers to do the same. It is perhaps telling that China recently signaled its interest in global environmental leadership.
Until there’s a change, however, China’s growth will continue dirtying the air in many of the countries that trade with it most, and their environmental crisis will worsen.
Jonas Gamso is an assistant professor of International Trade and Global Studies at Arizona State University
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.
So the West has exported industry, and pollution, to China.
Leading to infertility, esp in males
But wait a sec what West did to eradicate pollution they dumped past 100 years all over the globe? What did they do to help poor countries to be lifted from poverty in sustainable and ecologically less harmful way?
Let me answer – NOTHING.
LoL, China is not the nanny to the rest of the developing world, unlike u-s-a trying to "policing" of the world.
Whoever wrote this article doesn’t even have any common sense and is not even thinking logically.
China does not bear any responsibility to what others did with their own countries because unlike western countries and their ilk, China truly respects the sovereignty of other countries.
Even if China "advise" other countries to take care more of their environments then the west will definitely accuse China of interfering in other countries internal affairs.
It’s really a huge waste of time and energy trying to knock common sense into the head of the lunatic west.
While Chinese just love Africans ? Well the half who want ‘something abit larger’ dont.
Yashad Rizvi, Jihadists are neutered by the Christians, they have no guns and weapons; they are the tools of the Christians. All Jihadists can do is creating chaos, destruction and human tragedies amount the Muslims for the Christians.
Yashad Rizvi, Jihadists are dark for a reason, African’s abit larger is the major cause.
Donald Trump is Climate Change denier, he is expanding environment destruction from air to underground by removing environmental restrictions on fracking which is polluting and poisoning underground water tables in unprecedented scale and pace.
The American is burning millions of cubic feet of natural gas in the open air daily because they did not build pipelines to channel natural gas to storage before fracking the oil, the amount of greenhouse gas produced by the burnt natural gas is equivalent to running of millions of cars.
Americans is 6% of the world population but they used 25% of the world energy, mostly fossil energy; the American is fuelling the world’s environmental crisis not just the developing world’s environmental crisis.
Don’t blame China! Your own research shows that the pollution in the developing countries is related to THEIR GOVERNANCE! Don’t mislead your readers with your blaming title.
By far, the greatest polluter is the US military. Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia were drenched by billion of litres of Agent Orange that have destroyed millions of hectares of forests and cultivable land. Furthermore, the almost one thousand US bases around the World pollute more than any other country. Okinawa islands in Japan is a good example of pollution by a US base.
funny, most of what the Chinese has produced were destined for the western markets. So why just blame the Chinese, when it is the western consumers who swallowed most of those goods? The Chinese are just like the middleman. You don’t blame the middleman for inferior products, or the way they were produced.
This dork is doing amazing mental gymnastics in order to interpret this data in such a way so as to make "trade with China" negative. Well, for starters, China is by far the world’s largest investor in renewable technologies and the entire reason for the drop in cost for them over the past few decades. Pollution, especially air pollution, is dropping all the time in China. Second, "good governance" is accomplished when a population becomes well educated and financially stable enough to have both the time, freedom, and information to hold their governments accountable. This happens when, and only when, economies develop. To expect a country to magically have good governance before they have developed is moronic. Lastly, these environmental restrictions to development have prevented the investment most of these developing economies need to grow their economies. China is simply providing these countries with the opportunity to develop, instead of requiring that they not develop for environmental reasons. A hypocritical stance as western countries pollute the most by far per capita.
ddad
Pollution dropping in china ? Because it was the highest in the world at the time of the Olympics
Absolutely the W has very cleverly exported their polution to China, and paid for the geegaws with worthless paper.
Dont forget the 1m Uighurs murdered by the CPC
Joe Wong So you admit, the Chinese are, well, on the short side ?
Yashad Rizvi exactly! Now India is far worse and China’s pollution levels have been getting better yearly.