Spatial-temporal Differentiation Of Environmental Regulation Efficiency And Its Determinants

In recent years, the problem of environmental pollution has become increasingly prominent, especially air pollution, which is not only related to the people’s health,but also relate to the life quality of people. The environmental pollution is people’s hate and pain, and the government is determined to control it in the further. In the process of governance, the government should not only pay attention to the effect,but also pay attention to the efficiency.Data envelopment analysis (DEA) has been widely used in many fields as a powerful tool for measuring the efficiency, this paper uses the slacks-based measure(SBM) model to measure the environmental regulation efficiency (ERE) considering undesirable outputs, and uses ArcGIS 10.2 software to explore the spatio-temporal evolution of ERE, then analyzes the environmental total factor productivity using the DEA-Malmquist model, finally studies the influencing factors using DEA-Tobit model.The results show that firstly China’s ERE of year 2004 presents "polarized effect" in quantity, the number of effective environmental regulations of provinces gradually increased with the improvement of economic level, and "the polarized effect" was gradually weakened. Secondly, the provinces of effective environmental regulations in 2004 show strong "bilateral effect" in the geographical layout of the east and west. With the economic and social development of the western regions, the environmental regulations becomes invalid and will not become effective again until the economy develops to a certain degree, while the environmental regulations of the eastern coastal provinces has always being effective since 2004. Thirdly, compared to the ERE not considering undesirable outputs, the ERE considering undesirable outputs is more little. Fourthly, the paper also finds that the technical progress index has the largest contribution to ERTFP, followed by pure technical efficiency index and then the scale efficiency index. Fifthly, economic level, the level of opening up,the level of technological innovation and the population density have obviously positive impacts on ERE, while environmental governance investment and population urbanization rate inhibited the ERE to some extent, and the proportion of the secondary industry has no influence on the ERE.Finally, according to the above environmental characteristics, some valuable suggestions are put forward for the environmental regulations. First, adopt green development, and make full use of natural resource’s advantages. Second, adopt coordinated development, and optimize the allocation of environmental resources.Third, adopt open development, and improve the level of foreign capital utilization.Forth, adopt development of sharing, and accept wide mass environment demands.Fifth, adopt innovative development, and increase environmental science and technology support.