Will The Environmental Regulation Policy Improve Eco-efficiency?

As one of the country's main economic means for managing the environment,the sewage charge system embodies the principle of "paying for pollution" and is an important economic policy that promotes pollution control,improves resource utilization efficiency,and improves the ecological environment.Since the 18 th CPC National Congress,the construction of ecological civilization has become an important national strategy in China.As an effective indicator of sustainable development,ecoefficiency can comprehensively reflect the level of coordinated development of the region's ecology-resources-economy.Existing research literature on environmental regulation mostly focuses on testing the effectiveness of different types of environmental regulation tools.However,how to scientifically measure eco-efficiency and explore the impact of environmental regulation policies on eco-efficiency is still scarce.The research in this paper is of great theoretical value and practical significance to clarify the relationship between the reform of sewage charges collection and ecoefficiency,and to comprehensively use environmental pollution control policy tools to avoid the gradient transfer of polluting industries in eastern and western regions,effectively promote environmental governance and improve eco-efficiency.This paper employed the Super SBM(Slack-based measure model)model to measure and analyze China's provincial eco-efficiency from 1990 to 2017 by constructing an eco-efficiency measurement index system with capital,labor,and resources as input variables,and regional GDP and CO2 emissions as expected and unexpected output variables respectively.The results showed that the provincial ecoefficiency in China shows a trend of first decline and then increase.And the values of eco-efficiency in the eastern coastal economically developed provinces are significantly higher than those in inland provinces.More specifically,the level of economic development,foreign investment scale and energy consumption structure are the main influencing factors.On this basis,this paper adopted the difference-in-difference(DID)method to analyze whether the reform of sewage charges collection could improve the eco-efficiency.The empirical results showed that the reform of sewage charges collection has a positive effect on reducing emissions but a negative impact on ecoefficiency.After verifying that the reform also has a restrictive effect on the economic growth of the provinces in which the reform has been implemented,this article considers that the main reason maybe that the provinces that have implemented reforms transfers high-pollution and high-emission industries to the provinces that have not implemented reforms because of the increased sewage costs.That is,the inconsistency in the reform of the sewage charge standards across regions has led to high-pollution and high-energy-consuming industries undergoing a gradient transfer between regions.Therefore,the provinces that have not implemented reforms have gradually become the "pollution heaven" of the provinces that have implemented reforms.