Does Environmental Tax Policy Cause The Change Of Environmental Kuznets Curve?

Over the past 40 years of reform and opening up,China’s industrialization level has been continuously improved and the economy has been growing at a high speed.However,while we enjoy the huge economic development dividend,we have caused a lot of ecological trauma which cannot be made up in the short term because of the excessive pursuit of growth rate and the neglect of growth quality.The problem of environmental pollution is serious,and the living environment of the people is facing a great threat.Socialism with Chinese characteristics has entered a new era,and the main social contradictions in China have been transformed into the contradiction between the people’s growing needs for a better life and unbalanced and inadequate development.From "survival" to "ecology",people put forward more requirements for environmental quality and environmental protection.Environmental problems have become one of the most urgent livelihood issues in China.The research on the relationship between economic development and environmental quality has always been a hot topic in academic circles,among which the classical one is the Environmental Kuznets curve theory proposed by Grossman and Krueger.According to the theory,the environmental quality of a country will change from poor to good with economic development,and the relationship between them presents an inverted U-shaped curve.However,some scholars have proved by empirical research that the relationship between economic development and environmental quality is not always inverted U-shaped,but may also take on other forms,such as n-type,inverted-n-shaped and U-shaped.In addition,some studies have pointed out that the traditional environmental Kuznets theory is not perfect,economic development will not lead to endogenous reduction of environmental pollution,and economic development is not the only way to reduce environmental pollution.In fact,if we blindly put our hope on the development path of "pollution before treatment",and try to promote the improvement of environmental quality with the improvement of economic development level,it is likely that the environmental pollution level will exceed the threshold of environmental carrying capacity,thus causing irreversible damage to the environment.Since the environment itself has the attributes of non-exclusive and non-competitive public goods,in order to meet the requirements of high-quality economic development,China’s government has adopted a variety of regulatory methods in environmental governance for a long time,among which the environmental tax policy is a very important aspect.Therefore,it is particularly important to explore the impact of environmental tax policy on Environmental Kuznets curve.In order to study this problem,based on the provincial level panel data of China from 1993 to 2018,this paper conducts a preliminary test on the relationship between environmental pollution and economic development leve,in order to verify the existence of traditional environmental Kuznets Curve in China.The preliminary regression results of EKC show that:there is a curvilinear relationship between environmental pollution and economic development level,but these curves do not show the inverted U-shape but are inverted N-shaped;in the case of selecting different pollutant emission indicators,The shape and inflection point of Environmental Kuznets curve are also different;in addition,according to the commonly used regional division method,China is divided into eastern,central and western regions,and the relationship between three types of environmental pollution and economic development level in three major regions of China is tested by regression,and the robustness of the preliminary regression results is confirmed.Furthermore,on the basis of verifying the existence of EKC,this paper introduces environmental taxes and other factors that may cause environmental pollution.Taking environmental taxes and fees as the core explanatory variables and other related influencing factors as control variables,this paper establishes a panel threshold model to test whether the implementation of environmental taxes and fees policies will have a nonlinear impact on the level of environmental pollution.The results show that the environmental tax policy has a nonlinear impact on industrial waste gas and industrial solid waste pollution.In addition,the industrial structure,technological innovation ability and the degree of opening to the outside world also have a certain impact on the environmental quality.In a word,this paper proves that economic development and environmental tax policy will have an impact on the environmental quality of China,and the implementation of environmental tax policy will cause the change of Environmental Kuznets curve.In addition,environmental governance is a systematic project.In order to truly solve the environmental problems in China,we can not only rely on economic growth or the implementation of environmental tax policies.In the industrial stage of economic development,the improvement of public awareness of environmental protection is one aspect,but the more important thing should be the top-level design of the government and the technological transformation of enterprises.Therefore,we should also pay more attention to it We should pay attention to the improvement of green technology innovation ability,accelerate the upgrading and transformation of industrial structure,and give full play to the positive guiding role of international trade.In this paper,we try to change the method of introducing environmental taxes and fees directly into the model as linear factors in previous studies,and introduce environmental taxes and fees policies as non-linear factors by establishing panel threshold model.On this basis,taking the change of Environmental Kuznets curve as the research perspective,the change of Environmental Kuznets curve shape and inflection point before and after the introduction of environmental tax and fee policy is compared,so as to test the effectiveness of environmental tax and fee in China.However,in fact,environmental pollution itself is a very complex problem,this paper still has some shortcomings to be improved.Due to the unavailability of data,this paper focuses on the effectiveness of environmental tax policy.In fact,in addition to the collection of environmental taxes and fees,China’s environmental regulation policy includes many aspects.The impact analysis of the overall level of environmental regulation may not be comprehensive enough.In addition,due to the short implementation time of environmental protection tax in China,the environmental tax indicators in this paper do not include the new environmental protection tax in 2018,so it is impossible to analyze the endogenous effect of the policy change of sewage charge to tax.