A Empirical Study Of Domestic Environmental Regulation On China’s Export Commodity Structure

Environmental resources are public goods to a certain extent, have the general characteristics of public goods-non-competitive and non-exclusive, so it largely exists the phenomenon of market failure and needs for government regulation. Environmental regulation comes into being in this case, our country also follows the wave of the environmental regulation in the1970s. Changes in international environmental regulation standards will inevitably have an impact on China’s merchandise exports, especially exports of high-polluting industries, and thus will inevitably affect China’s export commodity structure. Therefore, on the basis of previous research on the relationship between environmental regulation and trade, this paper analyzed the impact of environmental regulation on export commodity structure mainly on the theoretical level from four angles factor endowments, industrial structure, FDI and technological innovation, and considered environmental regulation had the side effects on the trade structure from these four aspects, and these elements may also intertwined affects export commodity structure. Precisely because there are intricate relations between environmental regulation and trade structure, this article started from the environmental Kuznets curve, explored the relationship between environmental regulation and trade structure from the scale, technology and structure effects, in order to know if there was a linear or nonlinear relationship between environmental regulation and trade structure.Based on this, we adopted the2002-2008provincial panel data to empirical test the impact environmental regulations on trade structure, selected four different proxy indicators of environmental regulation, and divided into the country, the eastern, central and western horizontal comparison taking into account the difference of the level of economic development as well as the geographical environment. Meanwhile, in order to test whether there was nonlinear, the article followed EKC three models using four proxy indicators of environmental regulation, explored the relationship curves between environmental regulations and trade structure and obtained the inflection point. The results showed that in general environmental regulation was conducive to the optimization of trade structure, but existed with a certain degree of regional differences. From the long term, environmental regulatory of different proxy indicators promoted the optimization of export commodity structure, but its promotion effect was different because of the presence of the inflection point, but in the short term, environmental regulatory of different proxy indicators had the differences, and may even be an inverse relationship. Based on this conclusion, this article made policy recommendations from the angle of factor endowments, industrial structure, FDI and technological innovation.