The Influence Of Environmental Regulation On The Performance Of China's Export Companies

At the same time of China's rapid economic development,the environmental problems that follow are obvious.In particular,the smog problem that has received much attention in recent years has already had a great influence on people's health.The relevant state departments have also paid more and more attention to environmental governance issues,introduced a series of environmental policies,and gradually strengthened environmental regulation.Under the background of increasingly strict environmental regulation,the relationship between the export as China's economic growth engine and the environment has become a major concern in China.This paper sorts out the effects of environmental regulation under the conditions of open economy.The existing literature has formed three viewpoints,namely,the disadvantage theory based on the hypothesis of pollution shelter,the favorable theory based on induced innovation theory and the uncertainty theory based on comprehensive factors of "innovation compensation effect" and "following cost".Conducting research on the relationship between environmental regulation and export can not only enable governments to rationally formulate environmental control policies and achieve environmental improvement,but also help firms more effectively respond to environmental constraints and improve firm performance,which is of great significance for achieving environmental benefits and firm benefits.It is for this reason that this paper studies the influence of environmental regulation on China's export performance.In order to study the influence of environmental regulation on China's export performance at the firm level,this paper selects the export firms in the Chinese industrial firm database from 1995 to 2007,taking the two control zone policy as a quasi-natural experiment,using the double difference method and the triple multiple difference method to analyze the changes in the performance of China's export firms before and after the implementation of this policy and further test the heterogeneity of its role at the industry level,that is,it has different effects on industries with different levels of pollution intensity,R&D intensity,and state-owned firm concentration.After conducting the above research,the paper concludes with the following points: After the implementation of the two control zones policy,the performance of export firms in the controlled areas has dropped significantly by 10.7%,indicating that the two control zones policy implemented in China has played a certain role in restraining the performance of export firms in cities in the region.In addition,the two control zones policy has different influences on the performance of export firms in different industries.In particular,compared with non-polluting industries,export-oriented firms in pollution-intensive industries are more constrained by environmental regulations because they face higher sewage costs.Compared with non-R&D-intensive industries,export-oriented firms in R&D-intensive industries have achieved performance growth under the constraints of the two control policies.This is because R&D-intensive firms are based on technological innovation and increase productivity,and their creation benefits make up for the cost of environmental regulation.Compared with non-state-owned firm-intensive industries,export firms of state-owned firm-intensive industries are subject to less competitive pressure due to the protection of government departments,and there are not many technological innovation activities.Therefore,environmental regulation has a greater inhibitory effect on the performance of export firms in state-intensive industries.To this end,the government cannot adopt a one-size-fits-all model in formulating environmental regulation policies,and grant appropriate R&D subsidies to industries with high pollution intensity and low R&D proportion,and guide them to update their machinery and equipment.For state-owned firms,the government should encourage them to make full use of the technological innovation effects of environmental policies,thereby improving the productivity and competitiveness of state-owned firms.In addition,firms must realize the importance of innovation,transform the exogenous environmental regulation into the internal driving force of the firm,and form a win-win situation between environmental benefits and corporate benefits.There are two points in the innovation of this paper: First,the innovation of research perspective.At present,most of the research on environmental regulation and export is an analysis from a macro perspective—focusing on the use of national and industry-level data to examine the influence of environmental regulation on trade volume and product quality.From the microscopic point of view,this paper takes export firms as the research object and explores the influence of environmental regulation on the performance of China's export firms.The second point is the innovation of research methods.Judging from the variables of environmental regulation,most of the existing literatures use the cost of pollution control,pollutant emission intensity and policy implementation.This paper adopts two control zone policies to measure environmental regulation,and uses the double difference analysis method to effectively solve the endogenous problem of environmental regulation.