Ecological Innovation Effect Of Environmental Regulation From The Perspective Of Regional Heterogeneity

With the development of the Yangtze River Economic Zone in the new period rising to the national strategy,its system,policy basis and other social resources needed for its development have been basically guaranteed.However,the worsening ecological environment,the disorderly development of the Yangtze River waterway,unbalanced regional development,and the difficult industrial transformation and upgrading are the current ecological rings facing the Yangtze River Economic Zone.The problem of environment and regional development has become a stumbling block for its sustainable development in the new era.Under the background of building an ecologically civilized society and an innovative country,it is of great practical significance to explore the green innovative development mode of the Yangtze River Economic Zone and solve the contradiction between economic development and ecological environment,so as to promote the construction of the Yangtze River Economic Zone to become a new growth of China's future economic growth.Eco-innovation is an important factor to promote green and efficient development and enhance economic competitiveness,while environmental regulation based on government behavior and market mechanism is the key factor affecting eco-innovation activities.Reviewing the existing literature,there have been two mainstream theories on the relationship between environmental regulation and ecological innovation,namely "cost hypothesis" and "Porter hypothesis".The core of their debate is whether environmental regulation is conducive to ecological innovation.Although most scholars support the latter,and have carried out a large number of validation studies,and obtained some very meaningful results,these studies still have some shortcomings: first,few papers pay attention to the complexity of environmental regulation itself,the impact of different types of environmental regulation on ecological innovation is quite different;secondly,most existing papers focus on enterprises.At the industry level,ecological innovation pays less attention to urban ecological innovation.Finally,it is not necessary to fully examine the heterogeneity of the same region.Because of the differences in the economic and social basis within the region,different small regions will show different impact curves of environmental regulation for ecological innovation.Therefore,taking the Yangtze River Economic Zone as the regional research carrier,this paper empirically analyzed the impact of different types of environmental regulation on urban ecological innovation from the perspectives of government-based environmental regulation and market-based environmental regulation,based on panel data of 110 cities in the economic zone from 2004 to 2016,using multiple linear regression,threshold effect analysis and other econometric methods.There are some findings:(1)Since the 17 th CPC national congress,the environmental regulation intensity and ecological innovation performance of the Yangtze River Economic Belt have been significantly improved.From the perspective of the three mega-cities in the economic zone,the promotion of the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration is much higher than that of the middle reaches of the Yangtze River and Chengdu-Chongqing urban agglomerations,and the spatial distribution of environmental regulation intensity and ecological innovation performance of the cities above all levels in the region is more balanced.(2)From the perspective of government-based environmental regulation and market-based environmental regulation,"Porter Hypothesis" is also established under the Yangtze River Economic Zone as a whole;from the perspective of urban agglomeration within the economic zone,the impact of government-based environmental regulation on ecological innovation is significant in the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration and the middle reaches of the Yangtze River urban agglomeration,and the impact intensity of the former is much higher than the latter,while in Chengdu and Chongqing cities.The impact of market-based environmental regulation on ecological innovation is positive in the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration,not significant in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River urban agglomeration,but negative in Chengdu-Chongqing urban agglomeration.(3)There is a "threshold effect" in the impact of two types of environmental regulation on ecological innovation,that is,in different threshold intervals,the ecological innovation effect of environmental regulation has different manifestations,and this "effect" varies greatly with different regional backgrounds.Specifically,the impact of government-based environmental regulation on ecological innovation only exists "threshold effect" in urban agglomerations in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River,while market-based environmental regulation only exists "threshold effect" in urban agglomerations in Chengdu and Chongqing.In addition,not only environmental regulation will affect the performance of Ecological Innovation in the appropriate regulatory range,but also some external factors such as the level of economic development,market structure,investment in science and technology funds,external linkages and so on.In the corresponding threshold range,these factors will also affect the trajectory of Ecological Innovation in environmental regulation.