Abstract:

In order to promote technological change playing greater role for environment protection in China,it is needed to learn the impacts of technological change on environment,which can provide supports for technology policies.Being different from former qualitative researches,this paper calculated annual effects of technological changes on air pollution and water pollution by using dynamic base period statistics method during 1994~2004 in China.Depending on if abating pollution is the direct target,technological changes can be divided into two sorts: (1)Changes of producing technology.They do not aim at cutting pollution,but can alter pollution intensity and pollutant emission through altering pollution production in producing process.(2)Changes of abating technology.〖JP2〗They aim at cutting pollution.This paper decomposed〖JP〗 the technological effects into two parts by using pollution abatement data in environmental yearbooks:one is from the change of abating technology and the other is from the change of producing technology.The results show that technological changes cut pollutant emission at large.The change of abating technology reduces all kinds of pollutants with apparent annual fluctuation.Change of producing technology has uncertain effects to pollution emission.These results show that China's pollutant abatement mainly depends on “endofpipe” abating technology.Producing technology which reduces pollutant in producing process does not play its due role.Technological changes have not turn to “environmentfriendly”.Therefore,in order to promote China's technological changes to the “environmentally friendly” evolution,promoting clean production technology which reduce pollutants in production process is particularly needed.

Key words: technological changes/ abating technology/ producing technology/ environmental quality/ pollution intensity