Impact Of "Two Control Zones" And "Key Cities" Policies On The Cost Of Sulfur Dioxide Emission Reduction Of Enterprises

In the period of rapid economic development,China’s environmental pollution problem is becoming more and more serious,which hinders the sustainable development of China’s economy.Environmental pollution is a typical negative public goods.Market failure,information asymmetry and lax supervision have caused environmental pollution problems.In recent years,the Chinese government has taken green development as an important strategy and assumed the due responsibilities of a major country.Centering on the concept of green development,the ecological civilization emphasized by the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China and the high-quality development advocated by the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China all revolve around the underlying logic of changing the mode of economic development and improving the quality of economic growth.The essence of green development is to transform the original high-consumption production mode into an environmentally friendly and clean production mode.Therefore,in this process,it is necessary to reduce the use of high-polluting raw materials,increase the use of clean energy,and reduce pollutant emissions.In order to achieve the goal of green development as soon as possible,China needs the intervention of the government.In the meanwhile,Appropriate policies need to be chosen to promote the development model of low pollution and high yield.In recent years,China has issued a series of relevant environmental regulation policies,including both control command policies and market economy policies.So whether and how can the implementation of environmental regulation affect the emission reduction of pollutants in China’s industrial enterprises?Focusing on the core research theme of the pollution control effect of environmental regulation policy,this paper systematically discusses the impact of the implementation of environmental regulation policy on the cost of sulfur dioxide（SO₂）emission reduction.Based on the pilot plans of"two control zones"and"key cities"in2003,this study evaluates the impact of these two environmental regulation policies on the SO₂emission reduction cost of Chinese industrial enterprises.The shadow price of pollutants can accurately reflect the marginal emission reduction cost of pollutants.The shadow price estimated by the research at the micro level is more reliable,but the existing literatures about it mostly stop at the industry and country level,and few literatures calculate the shadow price of enterprises.In this paper,the input,output and emission data of industrial enterprises in highly polluting industries recorded in China’s industrial enterprise database and pollutant database from 1998 to2010 are used.Based on the quadratic direction distance function,combined with the meta frontier method,the SO₂shadow price of Chinese industrial enterprises is estimated.On the basis of estimating the SO₂emission reduction cost of enterprises,this paper uses the Difference In Difference（DID）to evaluate the impact of the two environmental regulation policies of"two control zones"and"key cities"on the cost of SO₂emission reduction.The following conclusions are drawn here:first,these two environmental regulation policies have no significant impact on the SO₂emission reduction cost of the whole industrial enterprises,because the enterprises affected by a single policy have the behavior of evading the policy-the economic output has increased steadily,and the SO₂emission has not changed significantly.At the same time,the enterprises affected by the two policies adopt the method of reducing the economic output of enterprises and reducing the SO₂emission of enterprises.Second,due to the different focus of government supervision in different periods,the cost of SO₂emission reduction in some regulated areas of the textile and paper industries has been significantly affected.Third,these two environmental regulation policies will affect the shadow price of SO₂emissions in individual industries.However,they are time-related.According to the empirical results,this paper proposes to create a good institutional environment,which helps enterprises reduce the cost of SO₂emission reduction in the way of scientific and technological progress.This environment requires the government to increase supervision;Enterprises in different industries adopt different combination policy tools for emission reduction.