| More than 40 years of reform and opening up has promoted China’s industrial economy to achieve tremendous growth at a rapid speed,and has also achieved the explosion of export trade.However,in the global market,while already at the top of scale,China’s manufacturing industry still remains at the bottom of the global value chain.The dilemma needs to be improved.What’s worse,the cost of resource overconsumption and environmental pollution has also come.In order to balance the relationship between economic development and environmental protection,the central and local governments have promulgated a series of environmental protection-related laws and regulations in order to guide and regulate enterprises to carry out clean production as much as possible.And out of the pursuit of a good living environment,the public is also more and more active to supervise the pollution behavior of enterprises.The pain caused by environmental regulations on the supply-side structural reforms and the urgent need for transformation and upgrading of the manufacturing industry are coming at the same time.The current economic development will naturally face a problem: What kind of impact will environmental regulations have on the international competitiveness of Chinese enterprises’ export products?This article first sorts out the relationship between environmental regulations and the export technical sophistication from a theoretical and logical perspective;secondly,analyzes the current situation of environmental regulations in China,and the environmental protection laws and regulations and the number of reports on pollution in local daily newspaper of 115 cities are collected and used as the measurement indexes of the intensity of formal and informal environmental restrain respectively.Then based on theoretical logic and the results of current situation analysis,taking 29,875 export enterprises from 2011 to2015 as samples,the empirical test was conducted to verify the relationship between environmental regulation and export technical sophistication.Research results show that: First,the formal environmental regulation has a U-shaped relationship with export technical sophistication of enterprise,which shows that when the formal environmental regulation is at a relatively weak level,the export enterprise faces relatively low environmental costs at this time,and therefore prefers to choose to pay directly for the pollution production activities,then production costs increase and international competitiveness declines,resulting in a fall of export technical sophistication.When the intensity of formal environmental regulations is further enhanced,enterprises are encouraged to carry out technological innovation to reduce pollution.Meanwhile,the improvement of productivity level brought by technological input can promote the improvement of export technical sophistication.Second,the relationship between informal environmental regulation and the export technical sophistication of enterprise is also U-shaped,that is,with the increase of the intensity of informal environmental regulation,the export technical sophistication of enterprises shows a trend of decreasing first and then increasing.Thirdly,in the industries with different pollution levels and technology levels,environmental regulations have different effects on the export technical sophistication of enterprises,and the impact of environmental regulations on the export technical sophistication of enterprises is particularly significant in the heavily polluted industries and high-tech industries.Based on the results of the empirical research,this article gives policy recommendations in the following three aspects.Firstly,the government should formulate environmental protection policies and relevant laws and regulations in a reasonable,effective and appropriate manner,distinguish them according to the nature of different industries,and actively promote them into practice;Secondly,the public should raise awareness of environmental protection,and forwardly take part in the supervision of pollution behavior of manufacturing enterprises through informal environmental regulation;thirdly,enterprises should choose an active way to allocate pollution control costs,and cannot blindly pollute first and then control.Instead of blindly polluting before treatment,enterprises should take the initiative to reduce pollution through technological innovation,which will also increase the productivity level and the export technical sophistication. |
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