| The rapid advancement of China's industrialization and urbanization have caused great pollution and destruction to the environment while greatly improving people's living standards,on the other hand,the higher living standards lead to higher demands on the environment.The contradiction that the actual environment situation is difficult to satisfy the public's demand for a beautiful ecological environment,has become part of the social principal contradiction facing Chinese society.Under this background,strengthening ecological civilization construction and vigorously developing green economy has become a national strategic choice,and designing a normative and reasonable environmental regulation system guided by eco-efficiency,is the key to dissolve the principal contradictions in the eco-environmental field.This paper taking eco-efficiency as an index to measure the coordinated development of the region's economy,resources and environment,to judge the effect of environmental regulation from the perspective of the eco-efficiency enhancing,and to explore the environmental regulation policy oriented eco-efficiency.The article is in conformity with the new development vision,such as coordinated development,green development and innovative development,which is of great practical significance to building "Beautiful China" in which man and nature coexist harmoniously.This paper focuses on the following issues:How does environmental regulation affect the regional environment performance and economic performance?How to further affect the eco-efficiency?How to measure the level of regional eco-efficiency?What are the characteristics of the eco-efficiency in different regions of China?Does the strengthening of environmental regulation in China have a positive effect on the promotion of eco-efficiency?Is the effect of environmental regulation on eco-efficiency influenced by other external factors?What regulatory measures can be taken to improve the regional ecol-efficiency?Based on the above problems,the main content of the article consists of seven parts.In the introduction part,both the domestic and foreign research achievements on environmental regulation and eco-efficiency are summarized systematically to find out the starting point and the research perspective of this research.The first chapter reviews the theory of market failure,government regulation,and the theory about the relationship between economic growth,environmental pollution and environmental regulation,to seek the theoretical support for this study.The second chapter analyzed the influence mechanism of environmental regulation on eco-efficiency,and pointed out that the impact of environmental regulation on eco-efficiency is achieved through two paths:the environmental effects and economic effects.The environmental effects can be reflected in three aspects of pollution reduction,resource conservation and ecological restoration;the economic effects are reflected in the three aspects of capital accumulation,labor employment and technological innovation.The third chapter,based on China's reality,summarizes the practice of history and current situation of China environmental regulation,and measures the intensity of environmental regulation in China from five aspects:investment in treatment in environmental pollution,sewage charges,investment in treatment of industrial pollution,the number of personnel in the environmental protection system and the number of environmental administrative penalties.The fourth chapter made an intuitive analysis of China's development status of ecological environment and economic growth from 2005 to 2015,and further build a econometric model based on STIRAT model to empirically analyze the environmental effects of environmental regulation construct a endogenous economic growth model including environmental pollution and pollution control investment to empirically test the economic effect of environmental regulation.The fifth chapter is the core part of this paper.Firstly,a Super-SBM-DEA model is used to measure the eco-efficiency of 30 provinces in China from 2005 to 2015,the change trend of time and spatial agglomeration characteristics of China's eco-efficiency are analyzed.Secondly,in order to objectively and comprehensively measure the effect of environmental regulation on eco-efficiency,based on the basic panel regression,the time lag,spatial dependence,and threshold constraints that may exist in the process of environmental regulations are fully considered,and construct dynamic panel model to test the lag effect,construct threshold panel model to test the threshold effect,construct spatial dynamic panel model to test the spatial effect.In the sixth chapter,based on the previous theoretical analysis and empirical analysis results,the main conclusions are summarized.Then,it draws some policy recommendations for improving environmental regulation and promoting eco-efficiency so as to provide reference for policy makers.Finally,it points out the further research prospects.This paper makes some innovations in the research perspectives,contents and methods.From the perspective of research,this paper evaluate the effect of environmental regulation from the perspective of enhancing eco-efficiency,and explore the construction of environmental regulation oriented eco-efficiency.In terms of content,in order to objectively and comprehensively evaluate the effect of China's environmental regulation,this paper fully considers the time lag,spatial dependence and external threshold conditions of environmental regulation policy.In the research method,using the Super-SBM-DEA model based on the relaxation variables,which combines the advantages of the SBM model and the super-efficiency model to measure the regional eco-efficiency;using the estimate method of combining the static panel model and dynamic panel model to analyze impact of environmental regulation on the environmental and eco-efficiency;considering the different effects of the absolute number and the relative ratio of investment in environmental pollution control when analyzing the economic effects of environmental regulation.Through the theoretical deduction and empirical research,the following conclusions are drawn:First,the environmental effect of China's environmental regulation is not ideal,and the economic effects is double-sided.During the study period,although the pollution emissions and energy consumption per unit of GDP decreased,somewhat,the total emissions and total energy consumption continued to increase with the growth of output.the pollution control investment can only slow the deterioration speed of the ecological environment to a certain extent,but difficult to reverse the overall deterioration of the ecological environment.The economic effects of environmental regulation are manifested in two aspects.On the one hand,the amount of investment in environmental pollution control has a significant positive impact on economic growth;on the other hand,the increase of the proportion of pollution control investment in GDP will inhibit economic growth.Second,China's eco-efficiency has a downward trend,and the regional differences are significant.The results measured by Super-SBM-DEA model and Malmquist Index shown that,during the study period,China's eco-efficiency showing a declining trend year by year,and the spatial pattern of eco-efficiency has shown that the east,central,and west decline in descending order,and regional differences are significant.Third,the effect of environmental regulation on eco-efficiency is lagging behind.In the time dimension,the effect of environmental regulation on eco-efficiency shows a U-shaped feature.That is,in the initial stage of environmental regulation implementation,as the intensity of environmental regulation increases,eco-efficiency decreases,but after a time delay(lag 2),the effect turned positive,as the intensity of environmental regulation continued to strengthen,the eco-efficiency increased.It can be seen that the promotion of environmental regulation policy on ecological efficiency needs a more regular process.The formulation and implementation of environmental regulation should not only pursue short-term benefits,but should be considered in the long run.Fourth,environmental regulation has a threshold effect on eco-efficiency.The effect of environmental regulation on eco-efficiency depends on ownership structure,urbanization level,and foreign investment scale.There is a single threshold effect with the proportion of state-owned fixed assets investment,urbanization rate and FDI proportion as threshold variables.Fifth,there is an obvious spatial correlation of eco-efficiency in China,and the environmental regulation has a spatial effect on eco-efficiency.The spatial dynamic panel model analysis results show that the impact of environmental regulation on region eco-efficiency is nonlinear,inverted U-shaped trend.At present,the intensity of environmental regulation in most provinces does not exceed the critical point of the inverted U-shaped curve,increasing the intensity of environmental regulation is conducive to regional eco-efficiency.the coefficient of spatial lag term of environmental regulation is significantly negative,indicating that the improvement of the of environmental regulation intensity in adjacent areas will reduce the local eco-efficiency.Through systematic analysis,this article draws some useful conclusions,and make some innovations,but inevitably there are still some shortcomings.In the future,it is expected to expand the research in the following three directions:First,this paper focuses on the macro-level analysis of the impact of environmental regulation on eco-efficiency,the micro-level analysis of the behavior choice and game between economic subject under the constraints of environmental regulation is not deep enough.It is expected that in the future research,the impact of environmental regulation on eco-efficiency will be further explored from the perspective of the microeconomic subject's behavior choice and game.Second,this paper lays emphasis to analyze the one-way effect of environmental regulation on economic growth,environmental pollution control and eco-efficiency,without considering the counteraction of these factors on environmental regulation.In the future research,we will establish a simultaneous equations model to study comprehensively the interactions between the above variables,so as to get more accurate results.Third,this paper regards the eco-efficiency as an important index to measure the sustainable development of economy,and uses it to test and evaluate the effect of environmental regulation.However,the eco-efficiency only takes into account the factors of economic growth and ecological environment,not related to social development,social equity and other important factors for sustainable development.Therefore,the eco-efficiency is still difficult to comprehensively measure the sustainable development of economy and society.In the future research,it is proposed to further investigate the social performance of environmental regulation,and try to replace the eco-efficiency with indicators such as ecological welfare performance. |
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