The Research Of Environment Regulation Effects On Forest Paper Products Trade In China

Nowadays,environmental pollution and ecological destruction has been a threat to people’s life and sustained economic development.Thus,with more voices calling for stringent environmental regulation,many countries have drafted laws and regulations to protect environment.With the ever-increasing development of trade liberalization and economic globalization,environmental regulation should be treated seriously in the international trade,which especially the forest paper production is strongly related to.As China has become a large country of forest paper products importing and exporting in the world,to provide useful responses to the environmental regulation,it is essential to research the impact of environment regulation on China’s global trade of forest paper products.At first,this paper defined the connotation of environment regulation,and gave some introductions of the evolution and development of environment regulation as well as trade theories of how environment regulations influence forest paper products.And then this paper expounds the production and trade value of China’s forest paper products,focusing on paper,wood and furniture.To identify the impact of environmental regulation,this research provided an empirical analysis using China’s forest paper products trade data from 2002 to 2014,including paper and paperboard,paper-pulp,wood-pulp,recycle-paper,log,wood-based panel,sawmilling,ply wood and furniture.Both feasible generalized least squares(FGLS)and seemingly unrelated regression(SUR)were employed herein,environmental regulation variables included in both empirical models.The results showed that strict environmental regulation posed significant positive driving effects on China’s import of forest paper products while insignificant negative effects on export.Respectively,both importing and exporting of paper products and importing of wood products benefited from environment regulation;while the exporting and trade of furniture didn’t show positive correlation but negative.Accordingly,this paper proposed several improvement suggestions based on these results,which may availably help avoid negative effects.