Impacts Of Environmental Regulation On Export Sophistication

In recent years,the traditional extensive trade has gradually transformed from the way of using cheap labor and promoting the growth of trade at the expense of the environment pollution to relying on high-tech driven trade to promote trade and long-term growth.The export sophistication,as an essential part of trade transformation has begun to draw more and more attention.The export sophistication shows the export commodity structure of a country or region and can to some extent reflect the technological content of export products and international division of labor.What are the main factors influencing export sophistication?With the constant improvement of the international environmental protection consciousness,will environmental regulation produce great influence on export sophistication?These are the research questions of this thesis.Hypothesis of environmental pollution and the Porter Hypothesis respectively,based on the perspective of short-term static and long-term dynamic analysis demonstrate that environmental regulation can generate both offset effect and compensation effect on the nation's and industry's export sophistication.Appropriate environmental regulation will stimulate enterprises to carry out technological innovation and industrial structure upgrading,thus improving the technical complexity of product export.The analysis of the impacts of environmental regulation on export sophistication helps analyze the balance between environmental protection and export promotion and propose appropriate policies to coordinate environmental protection and export quality improvement.In addition,the differences of the industrial production properties lead to different influenced levels of industrial production.With the increase of environmental regulation intensity,enterprises may make different decisions,leading to different production behaviors.As key industries of industrial upgrading,the production behaviors of traditional industries such as pollution-intensive industries tend to be greatly impacted by environmental regulation,and how this would influence industrial export technical complexity remains to be analyzed.Based on the above ideas,this thesis mainly discusses the relationship between environmental regulation and export sophistication from the perspective of macro-national level and high pollution industry level.The thesis consists of five parts.The part I introduces the research background,namely,the pressure of enhancing the level of environmental protection in China and the demand of increasing the competitiveness of export trade technology demand,which leads to the practical significance of analyzing the impacts of factors such as environmental regulation on export sophistication.Then the concepts definition,research methods and the basic framework are introduced,and the innovation points and deficiencies are summarized.The part ? is the literature review,which reviews relevant researches on export sophistication,combing the domestic and foreign scholars'discussion on the influence factors of export sophistication,and summarize the related researches about the influence of environment regulation on export trade and technological innovation finding that environmental regulation may not only influence export sophistication by offset effect and compensation effect,but also variable such as R&D spending which can further generate effects on export sophistication by indirect enffects.The part ? is the analysis of current situation,using the chart data to analyze the environmental regulation and export sophistication's development of China and the relative international level.Compared with the developed countries,environmental regulation intensity and export technical complexity of China both requires further improvement.Part ? adds environmental regulation into the Hausman's theoretical framework,the empirical analysis is carried out from national and high-polluting industries' aspects.Based on the national level,the thesis uses calculated export sophistication of 59 countries from 2006 to 2015.It empirically proves how environmental regulation and other factors affect the export sophistication with fixed effects model and system GMM estimation method.Based on the industry level,using the 2006-2015 panel data of high-polluting industries.The thesis analyses the direct and indirect effects of environmental regulation intensity with comprehensive FGLS estimated method.The part ? is conclusions and suggestions part,the present situations of environmental regulation and the export sophistication in China and the empirical analysis results are reviewed,and relevant policy suggestions based on current national conditions are put forward.The main findings are as follows:(1)Environmental regulation has a negative impact on the export technology level of the country and China's pollution-intensive industries,and the developing countries are more negatively affected than developed countries.But the effect of environmental regulation has an inflection point.In the long run,the compensation effect will become the dominant effect which promote the upgrading of national and industry export technology.(2)At the country level,natural resource endowment has a negative correlation with the export technology level.While R&D capability and human capital can actively promote the development of enterprise export technology.The knowledge spillover effect of FDI and export is more obvious in developing countries.Developing countries can obtain foreign advanced production technology by enhancing the openness of trade and investment to improve the export technical level.(3)At high-pollution industries level,the current situation of utilizing foreign capital actually hinders the increase of industrious export sophistication.It shows that most foreign investments that high-polluting industries attract are with low quality causing high energy consumption and high pollution.And the industry scale and R&D investment have positive impacts on the growth of industry international competitiveness.In addition,environmental regulation will further promote export sophistication of the industry by encouraging enterprises to increase R&D investment.