Study On The Impact Of Environmental Regulation On Total Factor Productivity Of Manufacturing Industry In Sichuan Province

In recent years,the United Nations has convened many international conferences to call on governments to actively face the problem of environmental pollution.Pollution is a typical manifestation of externality.The effective way to deal with the “externality” problem in the process of economic development is to strengthen the government's control,so the government's regulation is the key to deal with environmental problems.In response to climate change,China has made green development,one of its national strategies.Sichuan Province is located in the western part of the upper reaches of the Yangtze River from a geographical point of view.It is rich in natural resources and shoulders the historical responsibility of protecting the ecological barrier of the upper reaches of the Yangtze River.After the implementation of the western development strategy,the manufacturing industry in the central and eastern regions has gradually moved inland,boosting the economy of the western provinces and cities,and bringing about environmental pollution problems that cannot be ignored.Manufacturing industry is an important supporting force in the development of national economy.Total factor productivity can quantify the contribution of manufacturing industry.Therefore,for Sichuan Province,under the reasonable environmental regulation intensity,improving the total factor productivity of manufacturing industry in Sichuan Province is a powerful path to achieve green development.Through literature analysis,it can be seen that the initial emphasis of environmental regulation is on compulsory measures of non-market behavior.With the deepening of research,economic incentives and market-oriented mechanism measures have been added.At the same time,environmental regulation is no longer only a government act,industry associations and even enterprises are the main body of environmental regulation implementation,but also more emphasis on the role of environmental awareness and laws,such as tangible or intangible binding force.Total factor productivity(TFP)is actually a kind of residual value growth.In economic factors,the production surplus that cannot be explained by capital input and labor input is called TFP.From the existing literature,environmental regulation can affect total factor productivity through technological innovation effect,transfer effect,demand effect and barrier effect.According to previous studies,environmental regulation may have different impacts on different provinces and industries.Based on the “China Industrial Statistics Yearbook”,this paper chooses 25 panel data of subdivided manufacturing industry from 2007 to 2016 to study on the condition of data continuity.At the same time,considering the heterogeneity of the industry,the selected manufacturing industry is divided into heavy pollution industry,moderate pollution industry and light pollution industry.The total factor productivity of Sichuan Province from 2007 to 2016 is calculated by DEA software.The results show that although the growth rate of total factor productivity in Sichuan Province has slowed down due to downward economic pressure,the overall development trend is good,and the contribution of technological progress is the greatest.Traditional industries in Sichuan's manufacturing industry are relatively mature and the production efficiency is relatively leading.However,the overall production efficiency of light pollution industry is still not high.Although the technical efficiency of heavy pollution industry is not high,the role of technological progress is more obvious.This also reflects that in Sichuan Province,heavy pollution enterprises are also actively improving their technological level.After calculating the environmental regulation,it can be found that,on the whole,the intensity of environmental regulation in different sub-sectors of manufacturing industry has industry heterogeneity.Among them,the industries with high intensity of environmental regulation are still mainly traditional industries with high pollution and energy consumption.Based on literature analysis and current situation analysis,this paper further verifies the specific impact of environmental regulation,finds out the reasonable intensity of environmental regulation,and tests whether there is industry heterogeneity in environmental regulation.This paper uses threshold regression model to empirically test the impact of environmental regulation on manufacturing industry as a whole,light pollution,moderate pollution and heavy pollution industries.The regression results of the model show that for the manufacturing industry in Sichuan Province as a whole,the intensity of environmental regulation needs to be further adjusted according to the actual situation.The promotion effect brought by technological progress has not yet been highlighted,and the manufacturing industry as a whole is still in the "cost-following" stage.The impact of environmental regulation on total factor productivity of slightly polluted industries in Sichuan Province is consistent with that of manufacturing industry as a whole.However,the "Porter Hypothesis" effect of environmental regulation is reflected in moderately polluted industries.As the intensity of environmental regulation crosses the threshold,environmental regulation has a positive impact on the total factor productivity of the classified industries.Regardless of Sichuan manufacturing industry as a whole,especially the heavily polluted industries,it is necessary to promote the emergence of new economic growth points by technological progress,strengthen R&D investment,and make the original capital stock enhance technological capabilities through asset renewal,improve production efficiency,and guard against the situation of "diminishing returns to scale" of capital.Therefore,how to steadily promote environmental regulation and control under the current asset scale,improve asset utilization,optimize the cost composition,improve the actual conversion efficiency of R&D investment,and promote the formation of the diffusion effect of technological progress is particularly important.