Research On The Influence Of Environmental Regulation On Energy Efficiency Of Provincial Industry

Thanks to favorable conditions such as economic policies and demographic dividend,China’s economy has maintained a sustained upward momentum since the new century.Industry,as the pillar industry of China’s economy,contributes a lot to economic growth.However,constrained by the backward industrial development model and the lack of environmental awareness of local governments and production departments,the problem of energy and environmental resources is becoming increasingly prominent.In order to solve the above paradox,China’s local governments have successively launched environmental regulations.Then,in the current Chinese industrial field,will the implementation of environmental regulations achieve an effective improvement in energy efficiency? Can effective synergies be exerted between regions? How does the relationship between environmental regulation and energy efficiency work? How will we further improve the local environmental regulation system in the future?In order to answer the above questions,based on the traditional theories of externality,public goods and new functionalism,this paper expounds the influence mechanism of environmental regulation on provincial industrial energy efficiency from the perspectives of internal and external regions and puts forward the competitive hypothesis.On this basis,based on the modified endogenetic direction distance function,this paper estimates the industrial energy efficiency of 30 provinces in China from 2007 to 2016,and makes a comprehensive analysis of their spatial and temporal evolution characteristics.In order to empirically analyze the effect of environmental regulation on industrial energy efficiency in the province,based on the traditional spatial econometrics model and combined with the actual research problems,this paper constructs a general spatial durbin model,and examines the effect of environmental regulation on industrial energy efficiency from the two dimensions of internal and external.At the same time,this paper further discusses the heterogeneous effect of environmental regulation on industrial energy efficiency from the perspectives of policy lag and tool differences.The empirical results show that:(1)Limited by the factor-dependent industrial development model,China’s provincial industrial energy efficiency level is generally low,and there is a "east-central-west" decreasing gradient pattern similar to economic development characteristics between regions.The interior of each region shows obvious spatial agglomeration characteristics;(2)within the region,environmental regulation is conducive to the improvement of industrial energy efficiency,which means that the "innovation compensation effect" caused by environmental cost internalization is higher than the "compliance cost effect",which verifies the existence of "porter hypothesis" in China’s industrial sector.Meanwhile,based on the screening and elimination mechanism,environmental regulation ultimately promotes the improvement of energy efficiency through the upgrading of regional industrial structure and quality.(3)for the outside of the region,environmental regulation has a significant positive spillover effect on the improvement of energy efficiency in neighboring areas.Specifically,benefiting from the political and functional spillover effects of environmental regulations,neighboring regions will realize the improvement of environmental governance system and the sharing of energy utilization technologies,and finally realize the synergies of industrial energy efficiency between regions,and comprehensively improve the level of industrial energy efficiency.(4)from the perspective of heterogeneity,environmental regulation,as one of the policy tools for the government to correct the negative externalities of the economy,has significantly higher long-term impact on energy efficiency than its short-term effect;At the same time,the positive spillover effect of process-oriented environmental regulation on industrial energy efficiency is relatively weak compared with result-oriented environmental regulation tools,which are influenced by the cost and benefit of enterprise environmental governance.Finally,based on the above empirical conclusions,this paper puts forward some targeted policy suggestions from the aspects of optimizing the environmental regulation system,strengthening the synergetic effect of provincial industrial linkage and comprehensively improving technical level of energy factors in industrial industry.