Study On Spatial Difference Of Provincial Environmental Pollution And Environmental Regulation In China

Since the Reform and Opening-up, the social and economic development in China has made great achievement, but the trend of environmental deterioration has not been fundamentally curbed because that the mode of economic growth is extensive and the ratio of resource consumption is too high. Meanwhile, resource endowment, industrial structure and environmental pollution of regions in China are different, and the development and implementation of environmental regulation policies also has significant regional difference. Currently, the economic development in China shows the phase characteristics of "three superposition", which include the shift of economic growth, the adjustment of structure and the digestion of pre-stimulus policies. In order to correctly treat the relationship of environmental protection and economic development, actively explore the new road of ecological civilization construction and make effective environmental regulation policies, following questions need be discussed:First, how about the spatial distribution of environmental pollution in China and its changes in recent years? And what are the spatial characteristic and the changing trend of regional environmental regulation? Second, because environmental pollution has externality, regional environmental regulation policies not only affect environment in the region, but also have impact on environment of surrounding regions. How about the effect of regional environmental regulation when the spatial factors are considered? And whether the effect is reduced by spatial reason? Third, based on regional competition, how does the regional government choose its environmental regulation policies? Whether the phenomenon of "environmental race to the down" exists? How to resolve trans-regional environmental pollution?Based on the spatial difference of provincial environmental pollution and environmental regulation, the paper discusses environmental regulation’s impact on environmental pollution deeply, and researches local government’s decision-making of environmental regulation theoretically and empirically. The paper reviews the theoretical study of environmental pollution and environmental regulation, analyzes the changing trend and regional evolution of water, air and solid waste pollution, and discusses the spatial aggregation and dynamic change of provincial environmental pollution by calculating composite index of environmental pollution. Second, beginning with the development of environmental regulation policies, the intensity indexes of provincial environmental regulation are calculated and the spatial relationship of inter-provincial environmental regulation is discussed. And then, environmental regulation’s impact on environmental pollution is estimated by using Spatial Lag Model and Spatial Error Model. Finally, based on local government’s decision-making game of environmental regulation, the paper does spatial econometric analysis on the local government’s strategies about environmental regulation decision with Spatial Durbin Model, explores the effect mechanism of inter-provincial environmental regulation decision, and discusses how to establish the cooperation mechanism of cross-regional environmental regulation according to foreign practice and domestic exploration.The conclusions of this paper are as follows:First, environmental pollution in China has the phenomenon of spatial agglomeration, and its spatial dependence is reinforcing in recent years. Second, for the intensities of provincial environmental regulation in China, the spatial distribution has significant positive correlation and the spatial autocorrelation is increasing year by year. Third, the provincial environmental regulation in China can significantly reduce environmental emissions, but the inter-provincial influence of environmental pollution has negative impact on the nationwide effect. Fourth, there exists provincial competition among local governments in China by using environmental regulations. Furthermore, local governments mainly choose similar strategies from rivalry competition rather than different strategies from stagger competition. At last, the paper discusses related suggestion about building the cooperation mechanism of cross-regional environmental regulation.