The Impact Of Environmental Regulation On The Employment Of Floating Population In China

At present,China’s economy has entered a period of new normal.The country attaches great importance to the coordinated development of the economy and the environment.The central and local governments have formulated and implemented a series of comprehensive environmental regulatory policies that help promote energy conservation and emission reduction.Environmental regulations encourage companies to deal with pollution or save energy,increase their production costs and change their production activities,thereby affecting their labor demand.In China,nearly 30% of the floating population works in polluting industries,and environmental regulations will have a greater impact on them.Therefore,studying the impact of China’s environmental regulations on the employment of migrants provides a basis for further employment assistance to the migrants.At the same time,the study also helps the government to optimize environmental regulation policies.Based on the theories and existing research,this paper uses the 2017 migrant population dynamics survey data and provincial-level data to research the impact of environmental regulations on the employment of migrants.First of all,this article constructs environmental regulation indicators and studies the impact of the employment probability,employment income,and the difficulty of finding a job of the floating population.Secondly,this article combines relevant theories to explore the mechanism of the impact from the scale effect(changes in regional industrial output value)and structural effect(upgrade of regional industrial structure).Third,we discuss the different impacts of floating population in different education levels and regions.Finally,we use different indicators to measure environmental regulations to test the robustness of the conclusion.The research results are as follows:(1)Environmental regulation will significantly reduce the employment probability and income of migrants and increase the difficulty of migrants in finding jobs.(2)In terms of the scale effect and structure effect,the increase in the output value of the regional polluting industry will weaken the inhibitory effect of environmental regulation on the employment probability of the migrant population;while regional industrial upgrading will strengthen the impact.This shows that the floating population still relies heavily on polluting industries for their livelihood,and structural unemployment has emerged in the face of industrial upgrading.(3)From the perspective of employment indicators in three dimensions,the employment of migrants with junior high school,high school,and technical secondary school come to be known as secondary education levels is the most affected;the employment of migrant population in the central region is most affected.The innovations of this article are:(1)In terms of research data,this article combines macro and micro data.Compared with previous studies on the impact of environmental regulations on employment,this research adds individual characteristic variables to control influencing factors at a more detailed level.(2)In terms of research methods and content,previous studies have described employment from the macro level of employment quantity,employment structure,etc.While we describe employment from the micro level.And this article explores the mechanism of the impact of environmental regulations on the employment of floating population,this means we analyze the impact path in depth.What’s more,we also conduct research on the influence of the floating population of different education levels and different regions,enriching the research perspectives.