| Since the reform and opening up,China’s economy has been developing vigorously and has made a series of achievements that have attracted worldwide attention.In the process of promoting industrialization and urbanization,production factors have been clustered in the spatial scope,resulting in various industrial clusters,which also bring serious environmental problems.In order to solve the increasingly serious environmental problems,our government has started to increase environmental regulation to restrain the polluting behavior of enterprises,so as to achieve the purpose of environmental protection.Although environmental regulations can play a role in protecting the environment,they can also increase the production and operation costs of enterprises and affect the spatial layout of enterprises,which makes local governments caught in the dilemma of environmental protection and economic growth.In this context,clarifying the relationship between environmental regulation and industrial agglomeration and further exploring the mechanism of environmental regulation on industrial agglomeration are of great practical significance to accelerate the green transformation of development mode and promote high-quality economic and social development.This paper mainly consists of a theoretical part,a status quo analysis part and an empirical part.The theoretical part of this paper compares and summarizes the theories and literature on environmental regulation and industrial agglomeration,and analyzes the mechanism using the "pollution refuge hypothesis" and "Porter’s hypothesis",and finds that environmental regulation may reduce foreign direct investment,thus inhibiting industrial agglomeration,and may also force industrial agglomeration.It is found that environmental regulations may reduce FDI and thus inhibit industrial agglomeration,or they may force enterprises to innovate,improve technological innovation and generate innovation spillover effects to promote industrial agglomeration.In the analysis of the current situation,this paper firstly measures the industrial agglomeration of 30 provincial-level administrative regions in China from2003 to 2020 using locational entropy,and finds that the industrial agglomeration in the eastern region as a whole shows a decreasing trend,while it increases in the central and western regions;then the industries are classified into heavily polluted industries,moderately polluted industries and lightly polluted industries according to the pollution intensity Finally,we use textual analysis to measure the intensity of environmental regulations and find that the intensity of environmental regulations in China is generally on the rise.In the empirical part,this paper uses the panel data of 30 provinces in China from 2003 to 2020 for the empirical analysis.First,this paper uses fixedeffects model to study the impact of environmental regulation on industrial agglomeration,and finds that environmental regulation promotes industrial agglomeration,and conducts robustness tests by replacing environmental regulation indicators,removing outliers and using instrumental variables;second,heterogeneity analysis is conducted for industries with different pollution levels,different industries and different regions,and finds that the impact of environmental regulation on industrial agglomeration is heterogeneous;third,a threshold The results show that there is a single threshold value for industrial agglomeration,moderately polluted industries and lightly polluted industries;finally,the mediating effect model is used to verify the mechanism of environmental regulation on industrial agglomeration,and it is found that the level of foreign investment and the level of technological innovation play a mediating role,which verifies the theoretical hypothesis of the previous paper.Finally,based on the conclusions drawn from the empirical analysis,we analyze and propose suggestions for China’s environmental regulation policy and provide an outlook on future research directions. |
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