Calculation of the Impact of Income Gap on Environmental Pollution

This article uses the panel data of 30 provinces (excluding Tibet autonomous region) from 2000 to 2018, and uses pm2.5 concentration as an indicator to measure environmental pollution. It starts from the traditional EKC curve and adds the Gini coefficient to measure income gap as the key explanatory variable, in order to study the impact of income gap on environmental pollution in China. Regardless of whether it is a static panel model or a dynamic panel instrumental variable model, the results show that China as a whole has an environmental Kuznets curve of pm2.5, and the widening of the income gap is not conducive to the improvement of environmental quality. Among the selected control variables, the increase of industrialization level, energy intensity and foreign direct investment will aggravate the environmental pollution. However, the good news is that the rational advancement of urbanization has played a positive role in the improvement of environmental quality.