The Impact Of Environmental Regulation On The Optimization Of Industrial Structure

Entering a new era,the century long transformation is accelerating its evolution.The current goal of high-quality economic development in China requires us to promote the adjustment of economic structure in order to improve the quality and efficiency of development and promote high-quality development.Industrial structure optimization is an important way to achieve coordinated development among industries and form a reasonable industrial structure layout,and is also a necessary requirement for sustainable economic development.Environmental regulation,as a key influencing factor to reverse the optimization of industrial structure,can stimulate enterprises to carry out technological innovation,optimize and improve production technology,and improve production efficiency and resource utilization.However,environmental regulation is a negative externality behavior that increases the cost of enterprise pollution control.What kind of impact will environmental regulations have on the optimization of industrial structure? The mechanism and effectiveness of these effects are still worth further exploration,which is essential for achieving a win-win situation of environmental protection,sustainable economic development,and China’s future development.As a major national strategic development area,the Yangtze River Economic Belt not only possesses abundant natural resources,but also contributes significantly to China’s economic development.Therefore,this article believes that taking the central cities along the Yangtze River as the research object and exploring the mechanism and impact of environmental regulations on industrial structure optimization have important practical significance in helping China solve environmental pollution problems in the next stage of economic development.Based on the relevant theories of environmental regulation,industrial structure,and industrial structure optimization,this article explores the impact of environmental regulation on industrial structure optimization in central cities along the Yangtze River through real data statistics and model construction.This article first summarizes existing research literature and analyzes the impact of environmental regulation on industrial structure optimization through both direct and indirect impacts.At the same time,it provides a statistical description of the current situation of environmental regulation in China,environmental regulation policies and industrial structure development in central cities along the Yangtze River,and existing problems.This paper selects the panel data of 27 central cities along the Yangtze River from 2010 to 2019,and combines empirical research methods to analyze the impact on the upgrading and rationalization of industrial structure when environmental regulation means are divided into formal and informal situations.At the same time,heterogeneity analysis is conducted on the data by dividing time periods,introducing economic development level interaction terms,and dividing based on different geographical locations.The results indicate that there is a turning point in the relationship between formal environmental regulations and the upgrading of industrial structure.Currently,formal environmental regulations will bring a positive driving effect on the upgrading and rationalization of industrial structure.In informal environmental regulations,income level has a significant promoting effect on the optimization of industrial structure,while population density and education level have different effects on the rationalization and upgrading of industrial structure.(2)From a regional perspective,the effectiveness of environmental regulation measures in optimizing industrial structure varies among different watersheds.The reason is that the middle and downstream regions undertake the high polluting industries of the upstream region,resulting in less significant implementation effects of environmental regulation measures in the short term.However,with economic development,the overall promotion effect of environmental regulation measures will be achieved in the long-term implementation.(3)In terms of time,the environmental Kuznets curve was validated,and the impact of informal environmental regulation on industrial structure optimization was higher in 2015-2019 than in the previous five years,indicating that the issuance of environmental regulation measures has gradually brought greater positive effects on the next step of industrial structure optimization.Based on the above conclusions,the following corresponding policy recommendations are proposed: adhere to the implementation of formal environmental regulation policies,formulate incentive policies for the development of the tertiary industry,and establish green development funds to support related enterprises;Emphasize informal environmental regulations,establish and improve incentive mechanisms for talent retention,employment,and entrepreneurship,and achieve on-site employment of highly educated talents;Develop a differentiated policy system,flexibly apply two regulatory measures based on regional development,and work together with multiple forces from enterprises and governments to promote industrial structure optimization.