The Emission Reduction Effect Of Heterogeneous Environmental Regulation ——Empirical Analysis Based On Prefectural-level City Panel Data

The Sixth Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Committee placed the construction of ecological civilization in an important position in the overall development of the cause of the party and the state.As an important part of longer-term development,the party and government clearly put forward the long-term goal of socialist modernization of"basically realizing the goal of building a beautiful China"in 2035.Adhering to carbon emission reduction and air pollution emission reduction is the key link and the dual strategic task of China’s sustainable development.As an important means to solve atmospheric environmental problems,environmental regulation is of great significance to the research of carbon emission reduction and air pollutant emission reduction.Different types of environmental regulation have different implementation methods,implementation background and implementation effects,and have different effects on air pollutant emission reduction,and the action mechanism will also be different.Although a large number of literatures have studied the effect of environmental regulation,few researchers have compared and analyzed the effect and mechanism of different types of environmental regulation tools.Based on this,considering the availability and timeliness of policy data,focusing on two types:command control type and market incentive type,this paper takes 276prefecture level cities as the research object from the perspective of two specific heterogeneous environmental regulation tools:the quantitative results of environmental regulation policies and emission trading mechanism,The fixed effect model and double difference model are used to analyze the emission reduction effects of command control environmental regulation and market incentive environmental regulation on carbon emission intensity,PM_2.5 concentration and SO₂;The national sample is further divided into three sub samples:East,middle and west to analyze the regional heterogeneity of environmental regulation.On this basis,this paper selects industrial structure and technological innovation as intermediary variables,brings the intermediary model into the analysis framework,and explores the emission reduction mechanism of different types of environmental regulations on carbon emissions and air pollutants in prefecture level cities.The results show that:① command control environmental regulation can effectively promote carbon emission reduction and sulfur dioxide emission reduction,but the promotion effect on the reduction of PM_2.5 concentration is not obvious;The market incentive environmental regulation represented by carbon trading policy not only significantly inhibits the intensity of regional carbon emission,but also promotes the emission reduction of urban air pollutants such as PM_2.5 and SO₂.○2 the results of heterogeneity analysis show that the effect of command control environmental regulation is the most obvious in the eastern region,followed by the western,and the emission reduction effect in the central region is relatively weak,which has a significant emission reduction effect on SO₂ in the three regions;The effect of market incentive environmental regulation on urban air pollutants and carbon emissions is roughly as follows:the western region is the largest,the central region is the second,and the eastern region is smaller.○3 The results of intermediary mechanism analysis show that industrial structure has a significant intermediary effect on command-controlled environmental regulation and SO₂,the mechanism of command-controlled environmental regulation and CI is masking effect,and there is a partial intermediary effect between market incentive environmental regulation and CI and SO₂;Technological innovation has a significant intermediary effect on command controlled environmental regulation and CI and SO₂;Regulation of market incentive environment and CI,PM_2.5 and SO₂ have significant mediating effects.The research results of this paper provide a theoretical reference for reasonably combining different types of environmental regulation tools in China,optimizing the path of coordinated emission reduction of air pollutants and realizing green development.There are three main innovations in this paper.Firstly,based on the policy text,this paper establishes the indicators of command-controlled environmental regulation by quantifying the environmental regulation policy.Second,this paper expands the existing research from the national or provincial macro sample data to the panel data of276 cities from 2006 to 2018 to study the emission reduction effect of heterogeneous environmental regulation tools.Third,this paper brings the global emissions of carbon dioxide under the constraints of global carbon emissions and regional air pollutants under the constraints of local pollution reduction into the same analysis framework to more comprehensively investigate the emission reduction benefits brought by different types of environmental regulation tools.In addition,according to different types of environmental regulation,different empirical models are adopted,including two-dimensional fixed effect model and double difference model,to systematically analyze the emission reduction effects of heterogeneous environmental regulation on CI,PM_2.5and SO₂,and explore its action mechanism,so as to avoid not based on the characteristics of environmental regulation in previous studies,Unified caliber analysis leads to distortion of evaluation effect and difficulty in tracking conduction mechanism.