Environmental Regulation,Industrial Agglomeration And Emissions Reduction Innovation

In recent decades,China's rapid economic development has greatly promoted the formation and development of industrial agglomeration.And industrial agglomeration,in turn,promotes economic growth,and at the same time,brings about knowledge spillover and promotes technological innovation.However,with the expansion of industrial agglomeration scale,the problems of excessive energy consumption and environmental pollution are becoming more and more serious.How to formulate environmental regulations to guide industries to gather reasonably and promote the emission reduction innovation has become an urgent problem to be solved in order to achieve high-quality economic growth and realize development of energy conservation and emission reduction.What's more,different cities with different resource endowment have different industrial structure and environmental pollution problems,and the impacts of environmental regulation on industrial agglomeration and technological innovation are also different.Whether different cities can achieve win-win development of environmental protection and emission reduction innovation remains to be verified.Based on the perspective of difference of urban resources,this paper analyzes the direct influence mechanism of environmental regulation on emission reduction innovation and the mediating effect of industrial agglomeration.Secondly,based on the panel data of prefecture-level cities in China from 2009 to 2017,this paper constructs a dynamic panel model and analyzes the direct effect of environmental regulation on emission reduction innovation in different cities with the systematic GMM estimation method.Finally,the mediating effect of industrial agglomeration in the process of environmental regulation affecting emission reduction innovation is verified by the mediating effect test and systematic GMM estimation method.The results show that: First,the impact of environmental regulation on emission reduction innovation is different in different cities,and the inhibition effect on non-resource-based cities is more obvious.Second,environmental regulation promotes the industrial agglomeration of non-resource-based cities and has no effect on resource-based cities.Third,the mediating effect of industrial agglomeration is only significant in non-resource-based cities and is a non-complete intermediary.In other words,environmental regulation not only directly inhibits emission reduction innovation,but also indirectly exerts adverse effects by promoting industrial agglomeration.Finally,some suggestions are put forward according to the research conclusion: Make environmental policy scientifically according to the difference of urban resources and the actual development situation;Guide industries to gather reasonably and improve the efficiency of resource allocation;Increase investment in emission reduction innovation,and improve the innovation capacity and research efficiency.