Research On The Impact Of Environmental Regulations On The Agglomeration Of Producer Services

Since the reform and opening,our country’s economy has maintained sustained and high-speed growth,and its economic aggregate has jumped to the second place in the world,and its per capita GDP has increased from less than 200 US dollars to12000 US dollars(2021 data).However,industri alization and urbanization that support economic growth consume a lot of energy,generate huge pollution emissions,and lead to a series of by-products of economic construction,namely environmental problems.In view of this,our country has attached great importance to the protection and improvement of the ecological environment in recent years.To deal with environmental problems,our country needs to focus on the green development trend of pollution-intensive manufacturing.Therefore,relevant department s in our country have gradually formulated corresponding laws and regulations on the discharge of pollutants from the manufacturing industry and have strengthened the supervision and implementation.Manufacturing enterprises that discharge pollutants excee ding the standard face increasing production costs and increasingly severe administrative penalties;in such an environmental regulations,manufacturing enterprises can choose the path of technological innovation to reduce the discharge of pollutants and reduce the cost of pollution violations.In the process of manufacturing innovation,the specialized external services of the producer service industry have played an important supporting role in the manufacturing industry.Therefore,environmental regulations can indirectly promote the faster development of producer services and at the same time help to improve the quality of the environment.Based on the research background,this dissertation combs the main factors affecting industrial agglomeration mentioned in the external economic theory and the new economic geography theory.The analysis shows that manufacturing innovation level and labor factor abundance are two intermediary variables which environmental regulations affect the agglomeration of producer services.In addition,industrial specialization agglomeration is negatively affected by the congestion effect.According to this,this dissertation proposes two mechanism hypotheses: one is that environmental regulations promote manufacturing innovation to increase the diversified agglomeration of producer services and inhibits its specialized agglomeration,the other is that environmental regulation s promote labor abundance to increase the diversified agglomeration of producer services and inhibits its specialized agglomeration.This dissertation uses data of 284 cities at the prefecture-level and above from2005-2019 on the index of environmental regulations,the degree of diversified agglomeration of producer services and the degree of specialized agglomeration of producer services to empirically test our proposal hypotheses.The empirical results effectively support the hypothesis,that is,controlling for other conditions to remain unchanged,for each standard deviation increase in the environmental regulation s index,the diversified agglomeration degree of the producer service s significantly increases by 0.11 standard deviation,while the specialized agglomeration degree significantly decreases by 0.04 standard deviation.The results remain robust when controlling for a range of confounding factors that may affect the empirical results.In addition,in the heterogeneity analysis,this dissertation also finds that environmental regulations will effectively promote the diversified agglomeration of producer services in the eastern region and inhibit the specialized agglomeration in the eastern region.For samples of different grades of cities,environmental regulations will significantly promote the diversified agglomeration of producer services of second-class cities(third-tier cities)and inhibit the specialized agglomeration of first-class(first-tier,new first-tier and second-tier cities)and second-class cities.Then This dissertation tests the proposed mechanism through the mediation effect equation.Ultimately,based on the empirical results,policy suggestions are proposed to strengthen the construction of a diversified environmental regulation s system with environmental protection target responsibility system as the main body.It is necessary to choose the agglomeration development mode of the producer service s according to the location and time and promote the efficient and orderly flow of resources to promote the agglomeration development of the producer services.