The Impact Of Heterogeneous Environmental Regulations On Resource Environment

In recent years,China's economy has been growing rapidly,but it has also brought many problems.Under the background of more and more prominent resource and environment problems,China has implemented a series of environmental regulation policies to protect them.At present,it has basically formed a governance system combining a variety of regulations,such as command-control environmental regulation policies and market incentive environmental regulation policies.In theory,the policy effectiveness of command-and-control and market-incentive environmental regulations is the same in the context of complete information.However,due to the differences in information adequacy,resource endowment and market conditions,the effectiveness of the two has always been controversial,and it is also one of the hot research issues in the field of environmental regulations.For solving the problem,we will take National Key Ecological Function Areas Policy(NKEFAP)and Ecological Transfer Payment Policy(ETPP)as a natural experiment.The NKEFAP can be seen as the command-and-control environmental regulation,the main measures is to through the pollutant emission,high pollution enterprises shall be prohibited from entering the local market,it is forbidden to forest land and cutting natural forests,attention to products and repair ecological forest,ecological environment in order to protect the resources.The ETPP can be regarded as a market-incentive environmental regulation policy.It stipulates that some counties in the national key ecological function areas can obtain special transfer payments to compensate the economic costs caused by ecological protection,and give rewards to counties with good resource and environmental protection.Based on the hand-collected data of 1372 county-level governments from 2006 to 2016,this paper uses the DID method to identify the causal effects of these two types of environmental regulations on resources and environment and the relative effectiveness of policies.Specifically,the empirical research of this paper mainly focuses on the following three aspects: firstly,the average and dynamic effects of heterogeneous environmental regulations on ecological protection are evaluated,and whether the policy effects of the two types of environmental regulations are different;secondly,it explores whether there are differences in the policy effects of heterogeneous environmental regulations on resources and environment in counties with different resources,environment and economic development levels.We got the following main conclusions:(1)Market-incentives environmental regulation has more significant effect on forest resources and long-term effect,the performance for the NKEFAP make the forest resources increased by 6.7%,chemical oxygen demand was reduced by 15.51%,but the effect with the passage of time showing a downward trend;The ETPP increased forest resources by 8.2% and reduced chemical oxygen demand by 22.92%,and the effect was gradually enhanced over time.(2)Heterogeneity analysis found that the counties with better initial forest resources and higher economic development level showed higher improvement effect on forest resources.In terms of environmental problems,counties with higher initial water pollution and higher level of economic development showed higher effect of water pollution improvement.Based on the research results,the following two policy implications are obtained.(1)More attention should be paid to the role of market-incentive environmental regulations.The results of this article on the average and dynamic effects of the water environment and forest resources show that the NKEFAP and ETPP can both effectively improve the resource environment,but the resource and environment improvement effect of ETPP is better,and the dynamic effect of the NKEFAP has shown a downward and weaker trend.Therefore,our country should gradually transition from the command-controlled environmental regulation,which is the NKEFAP,to the market-incentive environmental regulation represented by the ETPP.(2)Adjust the implementation of NKEFAP and ETPP according to different regional conditions.The analysis of heterogeneity in this paper shows that,compared with counties with lower initial water pollution,poor forest resources,and lower economic development,counties with higher initial water pollution,better forest resources,and higher economic development have improved.Therefore,considering the huge differences in resources,environment and economic levels between counties,the Chinese government should dynamically adjust the direction and intensity of transfer payments.