An Empirical Study On The Relationship Between Environmental Protection Investment And Economic Transformation In China

Since the reforming and opening up, China’s economic development has been built on a high speed growth with high energy consumption, high pollution and increasingly serious environmental problems. Under the constraints of international low-carbon economy pressure and domestic resources, environmental protection become a key strategic choice of China’s Economic Restructure. The research select the energy intensity of GDP as the indicate of Economic Restructure level, urban environmental infrastructure construction investment, industrial pollution control investment and “three simultaneousness” of construction project investment as the indicates of Environment Protection Investment level. By constructing Panel data Vector Auto-Regression(PVAR) model and Spatial Panel Models based on 2003-2013 sample provinces and cities, the research shows that:(1) Environment Protection Investment is the main reason of Economic Restructure, moreover, each Environment Protection Investment′s indicator has different effect on Economic Restructure in different period obviously and Economic Restructure also promotes Environment Protection Investment;(2) Environment Protection Investment has obvious lag effect,the effect becomes increasingly important with the time, but will achieve convergence of the state;(3) Among the indicators of Environment Protection Investment, urban environmental infrastructure construction investment makes the greatest impact, but industrial pollution control investment is too low to play a scale effect;(4) Regional economic level has a high degree of spatial correlation, moreover, different region has different effect on Economic Restructure obviously;(5) The scale and structure of Environmental Investment should be optimized.