Research On The Effect And Mechanism Of Environmental Regulation On The Quality Of Export Products

Since China’s accession to the WTO,foreign trade has achieved rapid development and has rapidly grown into a major trading country.However,as the demographic dividend and labor cost advantages gradually fade,China’s comparative advantage in foreign trade continues to decline.On the one hand,China’s export-oriented development model is facing major challenges,and it is urgent to explore the"qualitative"leap of export products,so as to accelerate the cultivation of new advantages in"Made in China"international competition and promote high-quality trade growth.On the other hand,the environmental pollution caused by the growth of trade has caused great losses to social welfare,which has seriously restricted the speed of China’s economic quality and efficiency.In recent years,China has significantly stepped up its environmental regulations,and the situation of continuous deterioration of environmental pollution has been reversed.Then,whether environmental regulations can"force"enterprises to improve product quality in the process of pollution reduction and achieve a win-win situation of"emission reduction"and"quality improvement"is a problem worthy of in-depth study.First of all,based on the background of environmental regulation policies of some provinces（autonomous regions and municipalities directly under the Central Government）since 2007,the environmental regulation policy background of gradually raising the SO₂sewage fee collection standards adopts the quasi-natural experimental method,using the matching data of the Chinese industrial enterprise database and the China Customs database from 2002 to 2013,and using the multi-period multiplier method to investigate the impact of environmental regulation on the quality of export products.The results show that environmental regulation can significantly improve the quality of export products.After a series of robustness tests and the use of the instrumental variable method to eliminate endogenous problems that may arise due to reverse causation,it was found that this"escalation effect"was still significant.Further,this paper performs a classification regression of the whole sample according to the intensity of SO₂ pollution,the trade mode of enterprises and the country of destination of export,and the results confirm the heterogeneity of this"escalation effect".Specifically,from the perspective of SO₂ pollution intensity,environmental regulation has a more significant effect on the export product quality of enterprises in the"high sulfur emission industry"with large SO₂ emissions,while the promotion effect on the"low sulfur emission industry"is relatively small;from the perspective of trade mode,environmental regulation has a positive impact on the export product quality of processing trade and general trading enterprises,but the improvement of the former is greater;for different export destination countries,whether the export products of enterprises are to developed countries or developing countries,Environmental regulations are conducive to the improvement of the quality of export products,but the quality of exported developed countries is stronger.Finally,this paper deeply analyzes the internal mechanism of environmental regulation affecting the quality of export products from three channels:technological innovation,intermediate goods import and resource allocation efficiency.Mechanism inspection found that for the increase in the cost of pollution control brought about by environmental regulations,on the one hand,from the perspective of the enterprise,environmental regulation can"force"enterprises to independently develop and innovate,improve production efficiency,and then make the quality of export products continuously improve,but the role is relatively limited;on the other hand,from the perspective of the outside of enterprises,the implementation of environmental regulations can promote enterprises to import intermediate products,and the entry of foreign intermediates can bring more high-quality resources,improve production conditions,and optimize production processes for local enterprises.In turn,the quality of export products is improved.In addition,the implementation of environmental regulations can reduce the dispersion of enterprise productivity,accelerate the concentration of resources to advantageous enterprises,improve the efficiency of resource allocation,and then promote the upgrading of export product quality.