The Employment Effect Of Environmental Regulation On Employment

With the development of China’s economy and society,the problem of environmental pollution has become more and more serious.How to ease the contradiction between economic development and environmental pollution is becoming more and more urgent.Since the State Council organized the first environmental protection conference,environmental issues have gradually become the object of great concern to the Chinese government.Not only have a large number of environmental regulations and laws and regulations been introduced,but also a large amount of funds have been invested in ecological governance and restoration.Although the results have been remarkable,There are still some problems such as land pollution,increased haze,and garbage disposal that need to be resolved.At the same time,the 18 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China proposed to promote the realization of higher quality employment and the realization of full employment as an important goal of building a well-off society in an all-round way.As a country with a large population,China’s protection of people’s livelihood and employment is always the primary development task.In those years,Chinese government has tried great efforts to improve the employment environment.However,as the economy enters a new normal,the total employment pressure is not reduced.Therefore,under the background of the Chinese government’s efforts to promote the improvement of the ecological environment,it is significent to analyze the impact of environmental regulation on employment.Based on the relevant literature,this paper first analyzes the two transmission mechanisms of environmental regulation on the enterprise from the micro perspective of enterprise cost and benefit:direct transmission mechanism and indirect transmission mechanism.Then expand to the impact of environmental regulation on business employment: employment creation and employment losses,in order to fully understand the employment effects of environmental regulation.In terms of empirical research,this paper takes the “acid rain control zone” and “sulphur dioxide pollution control zone”(hereinafter referred to as “two control zones”)policies implemented in 1998 as research events,with 261 prefectures and above in China from 1991 to 2016.The city is sample data,using a double difference model to estimate the employment effect of the “two control zones” policy on the city.The empirical research results show that the implementation of the “two control zones” policy is not conducive to the improvement of the employment level of the city,and has a significant negative impact on the employment level of the secondary and tertiary industries.The dynamic regression results indicate that “ the two control zones ” "There is a certain lag effect in the policy.It has gradually weakened since 1999,and the impact has completely disappeared in 2004.From the perspective of the East,Central and West,the employment negative effects of the "two control zones" policy are mostly from the eastern cities,the western cities.Employment is not affected by the“two control zones”policy;from the perspective of pollution level,the negative impact of policies on employment is mainly from high pollution areas,and the results of light pollution cities are not significant.The paper proposes the following policy recommendations: First,optimize the choice of environmental regulation tools and develop environmental policies that are more suitable for local development.Second,carry out government-enterprise cooperation,take the government as the leading factor,cooperate with enterprises to develop environmental protection industries,and strengthen the main body awareness of corporate pollution reduction.Third,promote the industrial technology innovation of enterprises.Enterprises are the mainstay of innovation.The government should improve the construction of social innovation systems,encourage enterprises to increase investment in research and development of green technologies,and form a sense of innovation.Fourth,strengthen the cultivation of labor skills,encourage workers to self-employment,and achieve a balance between supply and demand in the labor market in China.The innovations of this paper mainly include:(1)The research literature on environmental regulation mostly focuses on the research between regulation itself and economic growth,foreign trade export,pollution transfer,etc.This paper takes a different approach and implements the “two control zones”policy implemented in 1998.For quasi-natural experiments,explore the impact of environmental regulation on employment.(2)In terms of research methods,it is different from previous literatures by seeking agency indicators of environmental regulation or constructing an environmental regulation comprehensive evaluation index.This paper introduces prefecture-level city data,adopts double difference model,and lags the dependent variable.As an explanatory variable,the endogenous problem caused by the proxy variable and the research variable can be avoided while better examining the inertia effect of employment.