Environmental justice perspective on the distribution and determinants of polluting enterprises in Guangdong, China

Abstract With the rapid urbanization and industrialization, the uneven distribution of polluting enterprises among different socioeconomic groups has become a prominent environmental social problem in transitional China but is rarely recognized. This paper introduces environmental justice theories in industrial location studies. A heuristic analytical framework is proposed to analyze the distribution and determinants of polluting enterprises in Guangdong, China, a highly developed region but with high social and economic inequality. Polluting enterprises are mostly agglomerated in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region with the rest in the mountainous and hilly non-PRD region. Bivariate local spatial autocorrelation analysis shows the colocation of polluting enterprises and migrants. Our regression results reveal that the county where many migrant residents are concentrated historically appears to attract many polluting firms to enter. However, less firms are found in the county with many highly educated groups and ethnic minorities. Land space planning, environmental regulation, labor costs, and agglomeration economy have driven the distribution of new polluting enterprises, whereas the influences of traffic accessibility and border effect do not work actually. To some extent, the distribution of new polluting enterprises must be recognized as a predictable result of the characteristics of prior demographic distribution.