The Cross-Border Relocation Of Pollution Intensive Firms Under Environmental Regulation And The Governance

Under the pressure of industrial structure adjustment and zooming of business costs from land scarcity , environmental protection, and so on, numerous manufacturing firms,most of which are pollution intensive and have made much contribution to the economic growth of the coastal regions of China,are confronted with serious crisises of survival and development.Meanwhile,the less-developed regions are engaging industrialization;the local governments have much enthusiasm with attracting investment and capital under the system of fiscal decentralization.In order to attract more foreign capital,some local governments compete in relaxing environmental regulation(even non-regulation),which is the most important incentive factor of the relocation of pollution intensive firms from the east to the west.Pollution migration is one of the most important forms of environmental collision on the sapce-dimension,as well as one of the most important reasons for the failure to substantially improve the entire environmental quality,whereas some parts are meliorating.It should be settled down under the sustainable institutional system of environmental regulation,which calls for a insightful and deep study on the internal incentive factors behind this kind of environmental problems on sapce-dimension so as to find the efficient regulation schemes.The study on the relocation of pollution intensive firms in China under the background of institutional transition and fiscal decentralization reform,not only offsets the existing literatures but also can be uesful for the reform of China's environmental regulation institutions as reference.With the analysis of the general characters of the relocation of pollution intensive firms in Chinese industrializtion,as well as the system of our ficscal decentralization and present enviromental regulation institutions,the thesis has mainly answered two correlating questions in chapter 4 to 6 and chapter 7 to 8 respectively:First,what's the motive mechanism of the relocation decisions of pollution intensive firms under the environmental regulation?Especially the reciprocal causation of environmental regulatory competition beween local governments and the location decions of pollution intensive firms,as well as the effect of public participation in environmental protection on firm relocation.We all know that industrial migration is essential to carry out the wish of industrial structure adjustment and accelerating indusrtiliaztion for the developed regions and the less-developed regions respectively,and to reduce regional disparity.So the second question is how to effectively govern the pollution migration during the relocating process of pollution intensive firms,and how to mitigate the negative effect on environment during the industry migration,through the reform and innovation of the present environmental regulation institutions.The thesis consists of nine chapters.Chapter 1 is an introduction to the whole thesis,discussing the research background and motivation for subsequent chapters,along with the structure arrangement of the thesis.Chapter 2 provides a comprehensive review of the correlating economic literatures,and identifies their strong and weak points to justify our strudy.Chapter 3 is aimed at analyzing the social-economic background and general characters of the relocation of pollution intensive firms in our country.In the following three chapters(4-6),the thesis presents the motive mechanism behind the relocation decisions of pollution intensive firms under environmental regulation from three aspects:the rational decisions of locational adjustment of firms under environmental regulation,the environmental regulatory competition between local governments and the public participation in environmental protection. Theoretical and experiential research methods are used simultaneously to draw the conclusions. Chapter 7 and 8 are focoused on the strategy of handling this challenge in the environmental regulation field.Chapter 7 investigates the regulation of the reloation of pollution intensive firms from the governments,including normalizing the non-rational competition among local governments,optimizing the present environmental regulation institutions and establishing a long-term mechanism of ecological compensation.Chapter 8 discusses how to set up a frame of polycentric governance,combining the governmental regulation,the firms' voluntary regultion and public self-regulation.The last chapter is the epilogue,the whole thesis is summarized in this chapter,as well as the major implications for environmental policies.