POVERTY, POPULATION AND ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION IN CHINA

This paper studies the relationship among population, poverty, and the environmental factors, and the impact they have had on China's land, water, forests and pastures, It does so by examining the extent of env ironmental degradation and China's success in controlling its environm ental problems is reviewed; by investigating how the leadership has tr ied to develop a legal framework and series of institutions to carry o ut environmental policy; and by providing empirical evidence demonstra ting the determinants of the successes that China has achieved int sur mounting (or slowing) some of its environmental problems, Five of Chin a's rural resource concerns are surveyed in this paper: water pollutio n, deforestation, destruction of the grasslands, soil erosion, and sal inization, The paper finds that government policy has not been effecti ve in controlling rural resource degradation primarily because it has limited fiscal resources and poorly trained personnel, and under these constraints the government has delegated responsibility for environme ntal and resource protection to the ministries of agriculture and fore stry, two institutions that have an incentive to favor pro-production policies, Instead, China's efforts to alleviate policy, integrate mark ets, and control population appear to have helped mitigate a number of adverse environmental consequences of China's development effort of t he last 40 years.