Environmental Regulation、Economic Growth And Environmental Sensitive Productivity Growth

Since followed the great policy of reform and opening, China has been rapid economic growth along with serious pollution, high energy comsumption and low utilization efficiency. However, this extensive economic growth model has resulted in the issues of resources exhaust and environmental deterioration, which seriously affect the quality of economic growth. Resource and environment are not only the important endogenous variable of economic development, but also the rigid constraints of the scale and speed of economic development. China’s resources and environment cannot sustain the extensive economic growth. In pursue of the goal of sustainable development, the China’s economic growth should be changed into intensive economic growth model. The resolution of the Third Plenary Session of the Eighteen restate the importance of accelerateing transformation of the mode of economic growth and speeding up the construction of an innovative country, driving our economic more efficient and sustainable.Environmental regulation, which is regarded as an effective tool of environmental protection, is the increasing intrinsic requirement of the people. Although the environmental regulation can alleviate the pressure of the environment, it will lead to extra "compliance costs", which may hinder the growth of economics. Some theoretical research and empirical studies have showed that environmental regulation under certain conditions may lead to a win-win relationship between environmental preotection and economic growth, but the degree of environmental improvement is limit on the premise of a certain period of steady economic growth. So a win-win relationship between environmental preotection and economic growth is hard to come ture. As a developing country, the first important task for a long time is still the rapid development of the economics under the guidance of scientific concept of development. Therefore, the difficulty of China’s environmental protection is how to realize the win-win relationship between environmental preotection and economic growth. The current economic growth along with the transformation of growth pattern will be uncertain. Researchs on the relationship between efficiency improvement and economic growth can help us to establish reasonable regulation policies for coordinating environment and economic growth and realize the sustainable development of economics.Based on the theory of "Potter Hypothesis", we using the data envelopment analysis and nonparametric regression approaches study the relationship between efficiency and economic growth and the effect of environemtal regulation from the perspective of efficiency and economic growth. The main comtents and conclusions are presented as follows:(1) We present a non-radical regional potential outputs measurement model based on the assumptions of variable returns to scale and technology heterogeneity. And we combine the proposed model with meta-frontier framework to measure the dynamic changes of environmental performance and recognize the effectiveness of energy conservation and emission reduction policy. The empirical results show that the average environmental performance of low energy consumption and low emission region is greater than that of other regions, and increasing factors allocation efficiency promotes improvement of this regional environmental performance. High energy consumption and emission region and middle energy consumption and emission region perform worse than low energy consumption and emission region is due to the fact that the technology of high and middle energy consumption and emission regions relatively lags behind compared with the low energy consumption and emission region. During the period of the observation, the factors allocation efficiency has been improved and environmental technology has been innovated in some extent among the most provinces of China. Although environmental technology in low energy consumption and emission region has been significantly improved, the environmental technology gap widens among low energy consumption and emission region, middle energy consumption and emission region and high energy consumption and emission region. Therefore, the average environmental performance of china is negative growth during the study period. However, the environmental performance is improved greatly when a greater energy conservation and emission reduction policy is implemented. This indicates that the environmental policy has played a positive effect on the environmental performance.(2) This chapter based on the conditional directional distance function and global production technologies extend the Malmquist-Luenberger productivity index into conditional global Malmquist-Luenberger productivity index. The extended index relaxes the restrictive separability condition between the input-output space and the space of exogenous environmental factors and it also allows the nonlinear relationship between the environmental variables and productivity. The suggested index is employed in analyzing30China’s provinces for the period1995-2011. Our results show a favorable relationship between the economics growth and productivity, which is against to the application of Environmental Kuznets Curve theory in China. The deterioration of environment is due to the cumulative of pollution emissions; Economic growth can affect the improving path of the environmental sensitive productivity growth. And there exist an inverted-U relationship between economics growth and technical efficiency and a U relationship between economics growth and technical innovation. This is mainly due to the fact that benefits and costs of efficiency improvement and technical innovation are changing in different levels of economic growth; the effect of economic growth on environmental sensitive productivity growth varies from province to province under the constraint of environmental regulation. The theory of "Poter Hypothesis" can be applied to the eastern regions of China where have high levels of economic growth but not the central and western regions, which illustrates that the policies of environmental regulation must be chosen carefully and adjust measures to local conditions.(3) Based on technology heterogeneity and meta-frontier analysis method, this paper proposes a policy directional distance function to simulate and analyze different policies’ effects on efficiency. The empirical results show that appropriate Carbon Reduction Policies can lead to win-win opportunities that it keeps economic growth and reduces carbon simultaneously, and it can contribute to the technology efficiency, scale efficiency and productivity, which account for the technology innovation and scale save. Because of the technological catching-up, The increasing rate of developing regions are faster than that of developed regions, narrowing the economic gap and slowing down the unbalanced economic growth. The results of this paper indicate that whether the Porter Hypothesis exists or not is depended on the changing of Carbon Reduction Policies, varying from region to region.