Research On The Green Transformation Of China's Iron And Steel Industry Under Environmental Regulation

Since the reform and opening up,Chinese economy maintains a long-term rapid growth.The extensive growth mode brings heavy costs to environment,and it is urgent to find a new growth mode to break the constraints of resources and environment.China begins to value environmental protection and green development in order to achieve the green transformation of economic society.The iron and steel industry is a highly energy-intensive and highly polluting industry,and the development mode must be changed by properly designing environmental regulatory tools.This paper takes the iron and steel industry as research object,and studies how the environmental regulations affect the green transformation through data from Chinese provinces(municipalities)in 2008-2017.The main contents and innovative results are as follows:(1)The extended Solow model is used to explore the mathematical mechanism for realizing the green transformation of industry.In order to achieve the green transformation,the iron and steel industry needs to increase the growth of green total factor productivity to exceed the contribution of capital to industrial output.Under the pressure of resources and environment,government should gradually establish environmental policies to promote green transformation.On this basis,this paper analyzes the impact mechanism of environmental regulation on industrial green transformation from two perspectives of direct and indirect impact,and proposes five hypotheses.The theoretical analysis provides support for the following research and makes the research more convincing.(2)The RAM model and Malmquist productivity index considering energy consumption and pollutant output are constructed to calculate the cumulative growth value of green total factor productivity,which measures the degree of industrial green transformation.The results show the level of green transformation of China's iron and steel industry increases year by year,and technological progress is the key factor in improving the level of green transformation.From the perspective of regions,the eastern,central,northeast,and western regions have gradually decreased.(3)The measurement model of environmental regulation affecting the green transformation of the iron and steel industry is established and tested through the systematic GMM method.The results show that environmental regulations have a heterogeneous effect on the green transformation of the iron and steel industry.The command-controlled,market-incentive environmental regulations are in the "U"-type relationship with the green transformation of the iron and steel industry,and voluntary participation environmental regulation is in an inverted "U" relationship with it.Regarding the mediation effect through foreign direct investment,the command-controlled environmental regulation promotes before suppressing,the market-incentive environmental regulation suppresses bofore promoting,while the voluntary participation environment regulation has no mediation effect of foreign direct investment.The three types of environmental regulations all suppresse bofore promoting through the mediation effect of technological innovation level.The intensity of environmental regulations in different regions varies greatly,and each region should refer to the fitting curve and inflection point of the model to formulate differentiated environmental policies.The results provide reference for the control of environmental regulation intensity in different regions.(4)Based on the fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis(fsQCA)method,the combination mode is obtained for achieving the green transformation of the iron and steel industry in strong and weak regulatory regions.The consistency value of the strongly regulated areas is much higher than that of the weakly regulated areas,and the combination mode is more explanatory.Each combination mode in the strongly regulated areas emphasizes the improvement of the environmental regulation intensity,but the weakly regulated areas have no obvious characteristics.Command-controlled and voluntary participation environmental regulations always appear in areas with small industrial scale or low economic development at the same time.Market-inspired environmental regulations always play a separate role and appears in large industrial areas.The analysis of the combination mode provides reference for the selection of environmental regulation types in different regions.