Economic Growth and Environmental Regulation : The People's Republic of China's Path to a Brighter Future

This volume assembles a group of eminent scholars to look at the problem of growth and environment from the perspective of environmental regulation. The questions addressed are: How does economic growth interact with regulation, and what are the best approaches to regulation in use today?

The context for the volume is the current situation in China, where twenty years of rapid growth have created a situation in which there are both demands for environmental regulation and needs for choosing a future development path. The advent of "A Macro-Environmental Strategy" for China presents an opportunity to ask how and why China should introduce regulation into its management of its development. The volume includes contributions from leading Chinese experts and established environmental economists from other countries including Timo Goeschl, Ben Groom and Andreas Kontoleon.

The volume looks at both the demand side of environmental regulation and the supply side. The demand side of regulatory intervention examines how regulation operates to supplement existing resource-allocation mechanisms, via effective demand aggregation and implementation mechanisms. The supply side of regulation examines how regulation operates to guide industrial growth down particular pathways, in the pursuit of managed development. Both sides of environmental regulation involve the important issue of implementation and enforcement.

This volume will be of most value to academics and scholars of environmental economics, growth economics, the Chinese economy and policy-makers of environmental regulations.

Timothy Swanson is Chair of Law and Economics at University College London. He has worked on issues dealing with regulation and growth in China for more than fifteen years, and has examined issues dealing with regulation across many industries and many parts of the world.

Tun Lin is a Research Fellow at the Asian Development Bank, focusing on issues to deal with China’s growth and development. He took his PhD at Cambridge University, focusing on issues dealing with environmental regulation and enforcement.