The Mechanism And Effects Of Environmental Regulation On Green Total Factor Productivity

With the improvement of economy,the issue of environmental protection becomes more and more prominent.The traditional development mode with capital and labor as the major endowments is no longer feasible,and sustainable development have become the new goals.Environmental regulation policies play an important role in solving the externalities of environmental pollution caused by industrial development.Whether its incentive to technological innovation exists or not is one of the criteria to judge the effectiveness of environmental regulation policies.As there is no uniform conclusion about how environmental regulation affects green total factor productivity in terms of industrial sectors,this article will conduct theoretical and empirical analysis.Based on the data of 35 industrial sectors in China,ML productivity index and its decomposition are calculated by the directional distance function,and a econometric model is established to test the impact of environmental regulation on green total factor productivity and its decomposition.How the pollution intensity of the industry affect the effect that environmental regulation have on green total factor productivity also be investigated.According to the calculation,the average annual growth rate of green total factor productivity in China's industrial sector from 2001 to 2011 was 4.97%,and its contribution to economic growth was 19.02%.The empirical analysis concludes that there is a "U" type relationship between environmental regulation and green total factor productivity growth and environmental technology efficiency improvement.The higher the industrial pollution intensity,the greater the positive effect of environmental regulation on the technological progress.The results show that the current environmental regulation level is still low at the left corner of the inflection point,and it is necessary to further improve the regulatory strength to achieve a positive impact on technological efficiency.For industries with high pollution intensity,environmental policy and intensity should be carefully chosen.