Research On The Impact Of Environmental Regulation On China’s Environmental Product Exports To RCEP Countries

With the rapid development of the global economy and society,various environmental problems have gradually become prominent,and environmental protection has become an unavoidable important responsibility of all countries.Entering a new era,China has also stepped up its environmental protection efforts.Environmental products are products that provide measurement,control,limitation,minimization or correction of environmental problems.As an important trade product category,environmental products are closely related to the country’s environmental regulation intensity.The signing of the RCEP agreement marks a new level of trade between China and RCEP countries.RCEP countries are important export regions for Chinese environmental products.For this reason,it is of great significance for the construction of high-quality regional free trade zones to select China’s environmental product export RCEP countries as the research object,and to explore the impact of environmental regulations on them.RCEP is a comprehensive and integrated regional trade agreement,involving trade in goods,trade in services,investment access and many other aspects.The implementation of the agreement will enhance China’s ability to utilize foreign investment and outward direct investment,and promote economic cooperation and trade between China and RCEP countries.In recent years,environmental regulation in China has changed from "command-and-control" and "market-incentive" to "pluralistic" and more spontaneous.The results of measuring the intensity of environmental regulations in RCEP countries show that the intensity of environmental regulations in China is generally increasing,and the intensity of environmental regulations in the more economically developed RCEP countries is relatively high.Using the "pollution paradise hypothesis","theory of factor endowments" and "Porter’s hypothesis",we investigate the impact of environmental regulations on the export of environmental goods and find that in the short term,environmental regulations will increase production costs and reduce production efficiency,thus hindering the export of environmental goods;in the long term,environmental regulations will promote the export of environmental goods by improving technological innovation,optimizing the business environment and improving production efficiency.Using the Economics of Regulation Theory and Porter’s Hypothesis,an extended trade gravity model is constructed for China’s exports of environmental products to RCEP countries such as Vietnam,the Philippines,Japan and Malaysia from 2009 to 2019.An extended trade gravity model is constructed to empirically analyse the impact of environmental regulations on China’s exports of environmental products to RCEP countries.The results show that: firstly,the intensity of environmental regulations in China is significantly and positively related to the trade value of environmental product exports,which is in line with the previous prediction that as the intensity of environmental regulations increases,the trade value of environmental product exports also increases;secondly,the intensity of environmental regulations in RCEP countries is positively related to environmental product exports,and the increase in the intensity of environmental regulations in RCEP countries has,to a certain extent,promoted China’s environmental product Thirdly,the intensity of R&D,the size of the economy and the degree of economic freedom all have an impact on the export of environmental products to a certain extent.These findings confirm the validity of some of the hypotheses of the mechanism analysis.In order to improve the competitiveness of environmental products and promote the export of environmental products,specific suggestions are made for both government and enterprise levels,such as improving the efficiency of environmental regulation implementation,actively participating in international environmental rule-making,and improving environmental regulatory capacity.