Research On The Impact Of Environmental Regulations On Green Total Factor Productivity In China

Over the past 40 years of reform and opening up,China's economy has grown vigorously,leaping from poverty and backwardness to become the world's second largest economy,contributing more than 30%to the world's economic growth for many years in a row,creating the“Chinese economic miracle”that has caught the world's attention,with a high degree of resource abundance,a huge demographic dividend and the completeness of the industrial chain,making China China has become the world's largest manufacturing country,and has achieved the reputation of being the world's factory,making a historic leap in national power and international influence.However,the pursuit of high economic growth rate for a long time and the reliance on the crude economic development model of“high pollution,high energy consumption and high emission”have also led to serious resource shortage and environmental pollution problems.In the process of pursuing rapid economic development,China has become the world's largest energy consumer and greenhouse gas emitter,and the environmental pollution problems that emerged in stages during the industrialization of developed countries over the past century have emerged in recent years.The deteriorating status of resources and the environment has become a major problem that restricts the sustainable development of China's economy and a better living environment for residents.For this reason,China has regarded the transformation of the economic development model and the importance of environmental protection as important goals of our social development,and has formulated a series of legal and administrative measures to protect the environment and ecology,increased the investment in environmental pollution control,and gradually established a sound environmental regulatory system,which has effectively managed the problem of environmental pollution in China.As China's economic development has entered a new normal stage in recent years,the pursuit of economic development goals has changed from high-speed economic growth to high-quality economic development.The establishment of a modern economic development system that takes into account resources,the environment and the quality of economic development,and the realization of the concept of green and sustainable development of China's economy,has become a major development goal in the process of building socialism with special characteristics in China.To promote green and sustainable economic development is to transform the original crude development mode of high intensity input of energy,labor,capital and other physical factors of production into intensive green and sustainable development that improves production efficiency,reduces pollution emissions and saves factor inputs,and the core of achieving this goal is to improve green total factor productivity.Therefore,promoting green total factor productivity growth in China while playing the role of environmental regulation policy is a necessary means for the current green transformation of China's economy and an important way to realize the construction of ecological civilization in China.In order to realize President Xi Jinping's economic development concept of“green water and green mountains are golden mountains”,the attitude of environmental governance of“seeking global ecological civilization and participating in global environmental governance”,and the development goal of building an ecological civilization society in China,this paper focuses on the impact of environmental regulation on green productivity in China.This paper focuses on the core objective of the influence mechanism of environmental regulation on green total factor productivity in China,and systematically explores the mechanism between different environmental regulation policies and green total factor productivity of different economic agents from multiple perspectives based on the review of relevant theories and literature,and provides a reference for the formulation and implementation of corresponding economic and environmental protection policies in China.In this paper,we systematically investigate the mechanism between different environmental regulation policies and the green total factor productivity of different economic agents.In this paper,based on the core purpose of the study of the impact of environmental regulation on green total factor productivity in China,the theoretical basis of green economic growth theory,technological progress and technological progress bias theory,externality theory,local government competition theory,green total factor productivity theory,environmental regulation theory,and the existing literature at home and abroad are explained and reviewed.In this paper,we study the impact mechanism of green total factor productivity in China from the perspectives of technological progress bias,economic pressure,central environmental protection inspectors'inspection and regional competition,and use different environmental regulation policy instruments.The specific research contents,research methods and basic conclusions of this paper are as follows.First,given that China is the world's largest manufacturing country,from the perspective of manufacturing industry,a feasible generalized least squares estimation(FGLS)is chosen to study the impact of environmental regulation on industry green total factor productivity,and the quadratic term of environmental regulation is introduced into the model to verify whether the relationship between environmental regulation and green total factor productivity in China is consistent with the inverted U-shaped environmental Kuznets curve.We further try to investigate whether environmental regulations can promote technological progress to enhance green TFP from the perspective of technological progress bias to achieve the dual purpose of energy saving and emission reduction.The results of the study show that the overall trend of green TFP in China's manufacturing industry is on the rise,and the improvement of technological progress is the main reason for the rise.By analyzing the factor input mix and technological progress bias of Chinese manufacturing industries,it is found that the level of input-based technological progress bias and output-based technological progress bias is generally on the rise during the study period,and the characteristics of technological progress bias factors are related to the development of economic structure in the current period.As for the output-based technological progress bias,most industries were biased toward CO₂emissions during the 10th,11th,and 13th Five-Year Plan periods,while the bias changed to CO₂emissions during the 12th Five-Year Plan period.During the 12th Five-Year Plan period,the bias has changed to the desired output.There is a stable and significant inverted U-shaped relationship between environmental regulations and green total factor productivity and technological progress in manufacturing industry,which can effectively promote the growth of green total factor productivity and technological progress as the intensity of environmental regulations increases.This also indicates that reasonable environmental regulations can improve economic development while improving the environment through the“innovation compensation effect”,and the current level of environmental regulations is on the left side of the inflection point of the U-shape.However,since output-based technological progress is biased toward output CO₂most of the time during the study period,the enhancement of environmental regulation helps to save factor inputs and reduce polluting outputs,achieving the dual goals of energy saving and emission reduction.Second,in view of the large scale of carbon emission reduction target and the goal of carbon peaking by 2030 in China,a double difference method is chosen to investigate the impact mechanism of low carbon pilot city policy on urban green total factor productivity in China from the perspective of low carbon pilot city policy,and to investigate whether cities can implement economic green transformation goals in the face of economic pressure.The results of the study show that the low-carbon pilot city policy can significantly improve the green total factor productivity of pilot cities,and its influence mechanism is to promote the growth of green total factor productivity by improving the green technological progress,which is the core element of green total factor productivity growth.Specifically,low-carbon pilot policies in municipalities directly under the central government,provincial capitals,and large cities can significantly increase their green TFP,while those in ordinary cities have no significant impact.From the perspective of the impact mechanism,low-carbon policies in municipalities directly under the central government and provincial capitals can not only significantly promote the improvement of green technological progress,but also enhance their technical efficiency.However,low-carbon policies in ordinary cities and resource-based cities negatively affect their green technological progress and have no significant impact on technical efficiency.Analyzed from the perspective of economic pressure,cities with different attributes react differently in the face of low-carbon policy implementation,i.e.,municipalities directly under the central government and provincial capitals are able to adhere to green economic transformation and effectively implement the policy in the face of economic downward pressure in the implementation of low-carbon policy,and economic pressure has a significant positive impact on the improvement of green total productivity.Large cities have no significant effect on economic pressure,while ordinary cities and resource-based cities have a significant negative impact on green total factor productivity in the face of economic pressure.Third,in the face of the problem of“legislation but not law enforcement and supervision”in the implementation of environmental regulations by local governments and the lack of penalties for environmental pollution by some local governments,there is a“collusion between government and enterprises”.This paper uses a breakpoint regression model to analyze the impact of green total factor productivity in China's cities from the perspective of central environmental protection inspectors,an innovative environmental regulation policy with the attribute of“campaign”governance,in order to investigate whether it can promote the growth of green total factor productivity and whether it has long-term effects.The results of the study show that the central environmental protection inspector system in China has a significant effect on green total factor productivity,and its influence mechanism is brought about by significantly improving technological progress,but due to the implementation of the central environmental protection inspector process to punish the pollution-related enterprises,production enterprises to rectify emissions and promote the application of environmental protection technology,the environmental protection inspector behavior of production enterprises in various industries and environmental protection inspectors to local government supervision The behavior of environmental protection inspectors has a negative effect on technical efficiency.The effect of the central environmental inspection system on technological progress is brought about by a significant increase in the scale of technological progress,although the system has a positive effect on biased technological progress,but it is not significant,indicating that the effect of the system on technological progress is to promote environmental treatment technology progress in the short term for the output of the“pollution”attribute of the production process,while the effect on the production This suggests that the system does not fundamentally reverse the technical nature of the production process,but rather regulates pollution emissions,and its effect is likely to be short-term.Fourth,the long-term uneven economic development has led to serious competition among local governments in China to achieve economic growth.The spatial Durbin model is used to investigate the impact of green total factor productivity in China's provinces and regions.The results show that there is a significant spatial spillover phenomenon of green TFP in China's provinces,combined with the Moran scatter plot and the provincial distribution map of China,which shows that the green TFP in China has obvious spatial agglomeration in the early stage,but its agglomeration state is scattered and the development level is not high.At the end of the observation period,the spatial status quo of“high-high”agglomeration and high development level was formed.Formal and informal environmental regulations significantly increase local green total factor productivity in both the geographic distance matrix and the economic distance matrix,and the increase in the level of environmental regulations in other regions can effectively increase local green total factor productivity,indicating a significant positive spatial spillover effect of environmental regulations,and the analysis results show that compared to formal environmental regulations,representing the public's willingness to monitor and participate in environmental protection The results of the analysis show that compared to formal environmental regulations,informal environmental regulations,which represent the public's willingness to monitor and participate in environmental protection,are more effective under the economic distance matrix,indicating that the public's willingness to participate in environmental events is more willing to learn from economically developed regions.The results of the competitive strategy analysis of local governments'environmental regulations show that both formal and informal environmental regulations are in a“you-are-stronger-and-I'm-stronger”competitive behavior in both spatial weight matrices,and the increase in the intensity of environmental regulations in other regions will promote the improvement of environmental regulations in their own regions.This indicates that the competition strategy of local governments at the provincial level is gradually shifting away from economic growth to the competition model of high-quality economic growth.It is of great importance to investigate the influence mechanism of environmental regulation on China's green total factor productivity,which is an important way to analyze the current stage of China's management of environmental pollution and promote the green transformation of the economy.This paper presents a series of theoretical analyses and empirical studies on the impact of environmental regulation on green total factor productivity in China,which complements the related studies on environmental regulation and green total factor productivity in China.The paper concludes that,after successive developments,the current environmental regulation system in China has been relatively sound and has played an important role in the management of environmental pollution,and that environmental regulation has played a role in promoting green total factor productivity at all levels.