Rescarch On The Influence Of Environmcntal Regulation On Export Quality Of Chinese Enterprises

With the rapid development of China’s economy and trade,the problem of environmental pollution is becoming increasingly prominent.In order to achieve the goal of sustainable economic development,China has intensified efforts to control environmental pollution and issued a series of environmental regulation policies.At the same time,the economic environment of Chinese trade is also deteriorating,export products are often labeled as "low price low quality".Under the dual pressure of aging population and declining birth rate,China’s demographic dividend has gradually disappeared.The trade growth model of cheap labor and low price of export products is unsustainable,China urgently needs to complete the transformation from "Made in China" to "Smart Made in China".In this context,achieving high-quality economic development and the goal of carbon peak and carbon neutrality are the dual goals of China’s economic development in the new stage.In the new double-cycle development pattern,the correlation between environmental regulation and the export quality of Chinese enterprises is worth further exploring.Based on the above background,by using the Deadline of Air Pollution Prevention and Control Policy in Key Cities implemented by the National Environmental Protection Agency in 2003,this thesis conducts a quasi-natural experiment.Matching the data from the Chinese Customs Database and Annual Survey of Industrial Firms(ASIF),it adopts difference-in-difference(DID)estimation to empirically test the impacts of 113 key cities’ environmental regulations on the quality of export products.The study finds that:(1)Environmental regulations will significantly promote the improvement of the Quality of Export Products of enterprises,which has successfully passed the parallel trend test,placebo test,the test of replacement of explained variables,and other robustness tests.(2)The heterogeneity tests prove that: impacts of environmental regulation on export product quality are heterogeneous due to regional differences,enterprise ownership,trade mode and industry.(3)The mechanism tests find out that production cost,product innovation and process innovation are the mediating variables of environmental regulation affecting the Quality of Export Products,and the mediating effect of process innovation was significantly greater than that of product innovation.The main contributions of this thesis are: Firstly,the mechanism of the influences of environmental regulation on export product quality analysis,differentiate from the general analysis of the effect of technological innovation.This thesis attempts to subdivide the effect of technological innovation into product innovation effect and process innovation effect.The mediation effect test attempts to characterize this theoretical mechanism more precisely.Secondly,this thesis adopts the quasi-natural experiment method,which can effectively avoid the endogeneity problem caused by environmental regulation measurement,and can comprehensively examine the changes of export product quality before and after the policy impacts,thus improving the accuracy of the conclusion.Thirdly,this thesis adopts more micro enterprise-product level data,which can provide a more micro perspective for the relationship between environmental regulation and export product quality.