It doesn’t look so cheap now…
A few years back I just got really amazed at how much stuff comes from China. How can it be that so many things can be made in China then shipped across the world and be sold at unbeatable prices?
The answer is simple. To cut costs you must sacrifice things like labor costs and pollution control. But it gets better. The negative impact on the environment of the Chinese modus operandi is so high that if one were to adjust China’s GDP growth rate, it would drop 5.8% to 3%. This drop represented a cost of $67 billion in 2004! At a 3% growth rate, China hardly would be an economic miracle.
But rates are rather elusive units of measurement. Let’s look at some hard numbers. For example, “Chinese environmental experts, estimated that annual premature deaths attributable to outdoor air pollution were likely to reach 380,000 in 2010 and 550,000 in 2020.” Water related pollution caused an estimated 750,000 deaths annually in China. That’s over one million people every year just from water and air!!!
The situation is so bleak that the athletes in the 2008 Olympic games will probably perform below par because the air in Beijing is so polluted.
What to do, what to do?… Pollute less, I guess. But the Chinese government is worried that that might dampen the fabulous Chinese economic growth. So, as I see it, the issue boils down to: do you want to be poor in a clean environment or would you rather have a little bit of money in an environment that could kill you?
