A Study On The Economic Effects Of China’s Three Types Of Environmental Policies

For a long time,the extensive development mode with resources as the main driving force of economic development has caused great pressure on China’s natural environment.With the increasing exposure of major environmental pollution incidents in recent years,it has become the consistent requirement of the whole country to realize the economic transformation from factor driven and investment scale driven development to innovation driven and green development as soon as possible.How to achieve the dual goals of economic development and environmental protection has also become a hot topic in the academic research field.On the basis of combing the relevant literature of three types of environmental policies,this dissertation uses empirical methods to test the macro and micro effects of different types of environmental policies on green economic development and enterprises’ technological innovation in order to provide a reference for the realization of the transformation of comprehensive green development.The specific research steps and conclusions are as follows.Firstly,based on the joint prevention and control mechanism of air pollution in urban agglomerations proposed in 《The 12 th Five Year Plan of air pollution prevention and control in key regions》,this dissertation studies the impact of command control environmental policy on the total factor productivity of enterprises in the region and finds that the emission reduction targets of sulfur dioxide,nitrogen oxides and industrial smoke and dust are set to be 12%,13% and 10% respectively,and reveals that the enterprises can effectively improve the total factor productivity under the pressure of setting clear pollutant emission reduction targets,but the mechanism test shows that the implementation of the plan does not achieve the effect of inducing technological innovation proposed by Porter hypothesis.On the contrary,it increases the production cost of enterprises,causes crowding out effect on R&D investment of enterprises,and inhibits technological innovation activities of enterprises.Through the investigation of the two key production factors of labor and capital investment,this dissertation finds that the implementation of the plan promotes the growth of the labor scale of Listed Companies in the three urban agglomerations,and reduces the financing cost of enterprises by optimizing the financial management level,which is an important channel for the plan to promote the total factor productivity of Listed Companies in the affected areas.Secondly,based on the quasi natural experiment of sulfur dioxide emission fee increasing in batches in all provinces of China,the green total factor productivity considering resource and environmental constraints is introduced as the measurement index of green development,and the influence of market incentive environmental policy on green development is investigated by using the method of propensity score matching and difference-in-difference.The results show that: the increase of sewage charges can not promote green development from the macro level,even worse it has a significant inhibitory effect on green development.Mechanism test shows that the reasons for this phenomenon are the low level of technology and the change of industrial structure.Further,this dissertation also examines the impact of sulfur dioxide emission fee reform on the total factor productivity of manufacturing enterprises from the micro level.The empirical results show that:(1)the policy significantly improves the total factor productivity of manufacturing industry,which is consistent with Porter hypothesis;(2)the policy reduces the resource mismatch level of high polluting industries,which may be a potential transmission mechanism;(3)the policy promotes technological innovation and financial management optimization of enterprises,thus improving the total factor productivity.Therefore,the environmental regulation measures should be tailored according to the characteristics of regional endowment,and combined with the characteristics of industry to determine the appropriate intensity of environmental regulation.Finally,based on the quasi natural experiment of 《measures for environmental information disclosure of enterprises and institutions》 issued by the Ministry of environmental protection in 2015,this dessertation investigates the impact of public participation and voluntary environmental policies represented by environmental information disclosure on the level of green technology innovation of enterprises.It is found that the mandatory disclosure policy of environmental information can significantly promote enterprises to carry out green technology innovation activities,and this promotion effect is more obvious in large-scale enterprises and enterprises in the eastern region.Meanwhile,this dissertation also reveals that the regulatory pressure has a significant impact on the effect of promoting green technology innovation by environmental information disclosure.Based on the theoretical analysis and empirical tests,this dissertation finds that each of the three different kinds of environmental policies in China has advantages and disadvantages in the implementation process: the effect of total emission reduction of the ordered control environmental policy is immediate,but it does not promote the growth of green technology,which is not conducive to the long-term green growth of the economy;market incentive environmental policy can induce enterprises to carry out technological innovation,but the contribution of green total factor productivity in macro level is not obvious;public participation environmental policy can fully mobilize the environmental awareness and action of micro individuals,which may become the mainstream direction of environmental policy in the future.However,it has strong requirements for the enforcement ability of regulatory authorities,and has little achievement in the weak supervision areas.In conclusion,in the future environmental policy design,different types of environmental policies should be organically combined according to the specific elements such as regional characteristics,industry characteristics and pollutant types,so as to avoid the emergence of one-dimensional mandatory policy documents,give full play to the power of market mechanism and supervision mechanism of the masses,and stimulate the enterprises’ own initiative of pollution reduction and emission reduction,so as to improve the green total factor productivity by means of technological innovation and product green transformation.