Economic Growth and Transnational Pollution Transfer: Verification of the Trading Environmental Kuznets Curve Hypothesis

With the economic globalization and the development of various countries, transnational pollution transfer has become a common phenomenon and is in-creasingly being monitored by the international community. This paper uses the fixed-effects regression model and the balanced panel data of 50 countries from 1990 to 2016, innovatively proposes the Trading Environmental Kuznets Curve (TEKC) and empirically tests it from the perspective of the difference between ecological footprint’s import and export, and explains the internal mechanism of the TEKC. The results demonstrate a U-shaped relationship between per capita GDP and the outward pollution transfer amount in pollution transferring coun-tries. The scale effect prevents outward pollution transfer, whereas the structur-al and technological effects promote it. In pollution-transferred countries, the relationship between per capita GDP and inward pollution transfer amount was inverted U-shaped. The scale effect encourages inward pollution transfer, whereas the structural and technological effects inhibit it. The results of this study confirm that "pollution havens" are universal worldwide and reflect the nonlinear change of pollution transfer amounts under the influence of economic development. The conclusion of this paper is an extensibility verification of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) in the field of transnational pollution transfer.