Environmental Regulation,Industrial Structure Adjustment And China’s Employment Structure

Protecting the environment is an inherent requirement for achieving sustainable development,and as the economy moves from the stage of high-speed growth to the stage of high-quality development,China has been paying more attention to environmental issues.Since the 18th Party Congress,the government has vigorously promoted the construction of ecological civilization,environmental governance has been increasing,and the environmental regulation system has been gradually improved.While environmental regulations improve environmental quality,they also have an impact on industrial structure and employment.Employment is related to people’s well-being,and solving the employment problem is important to improve people’s happiness and sense of access.The 14th Five-Year Plan clearly states that we should implement the employment priority strategy and alleviate structural employment conflicts.In addition,environmental regulation also has an indirect impact on employment through the adjustment of industrial structure.Therefore,it is of great practical significance to study the intrinsic linkage between environmental regulation,industrial structure and employment to help provide policy recommendations from the perspective of improving the environment and promoting employment.From the perspective of employment structure,this thesis integrates environmental regulation,industrial structure and employment structure into the same research framework.First,it analyzes the direct and indirect paths of environmental regulation affecting employment structure from the perspective of theoretical mechanism.And the actual situation of environmental regulation,industrial structure and employment structure is analyzed;on this basis,the employment structure is subdivided into employment skills structure and employment industry structure,and a two-way fixed effect model,a mediation effect model and a panel threshold model are constructed.It empirically tests the direct,indirect and nonlinear effects of environmental regulation on the employment structure.Finally,it puts forward relevant policy suggestions based on the conclusions of the study.The research results show that:(1)Environmental regulation can directly affect the employment structure,and strengthening environmental regulation will increase the proportion of the tertiary industry and high-skilled labor force,and this conclusion still holds after replacing the main explanatory variables.(2)While environmental regulation directly affects the employment structure,it will also have a positive impact on the employment skills structure and employment industry structure by adjusting the industrial structure.(3)Environmental regulation has a non-linear impact on employment structure.For the employment skills structure,environmental regulation itself does not have a threshold effect,and the industrial structure has a single threshold effect;for the employment industry structure,both environmental regulation and industrial structure have a double threshold effect.According to the above research conclusions,this thesis puts forward the following policy recommendations:first,we should implement differentiated and targeted environmental regulation policies according to local conditions,and optimize the environmental governance system;second,we should continuously optimize the industrial structure,expand employment space,and attract high-skilled personnel;then,it is necessary to increase investment in education,strengthen vocational skills training,improve the quality of the labor force,and promote the matching of people and positions;finally,it is necessary to unblock the channels for labor mobility and reduce barriers to labor mobility.