Environmental Regulation,Foreign Direct Investment And Export Product Quality

In recent years,the scale of China’s foreign trade keeps expanding and the level of economic development keeps improving,but the accompanying environmental pollution problem becomes more and more serious.The Chinese government pays high attention to it and has issued a series of environmental regulation policies.Under the new opening economic system,the effect of internal policies will be affected by the open factors,especially in the field of export trade,so foreign direct investment plays an important role.We need to further investigate the role of foreign investment activities in this process.This paper measures the intensity of Chinese environmental regulation policies from 2004 to 2011,uses the fixed effect model to empirically investigate the impact of environmental regulation policies on the quality of Chinese enterprises’ export products,and on this basis,examines the moderating role of foreign direct investment activities in this mechanism.The findings are as follows:(1)In general,Chinese environmental regulation policies have a significant restraining effect on the quality of enterprises’ export products;foreign direct investment has played a regulatory role in promoting the quality of export products,this dual role can promote the quality of export products.(2)The heterogeneity test shows that,in the aspect of enterprise characteristics,foreign enterprises are more affected by environmental regulation;in the aspect of industry characteristics,the improvement effect of foreign direct investment on high pollution industries is limited,and capital intensive industries are more sensitive than labor-intensive industries.(3)In the aspect of mechanism,it shows productivity driven effect and financing driven effect.Environmental regulation policy reduces the productivity level and leads to the decline of export product quality.In this process,foreign direct investment promotes the productivity level and offsets the negative impact;environmental regulation policy increases the cost,makes the financial situation of enterprises tight,and reduces the financing ability,leading to enterprises to give up.Foreign direct investment offsets this negative impact by introducing capital and technology,and improves the effect of environmental regulation on the quality of export products.This paper uses the regression method to measure the quality of export products,solves the problem of measurement error,combines with foreign direct investment to investigate the impact of environmental regulation on the quality of export products,overcomes the limitations of only from the domestic perspective to investigate the role of environmental protection,and expands the relevant research.