Fdi,Environmental Regulation And High-Quality Economic Development

The foreign direct investment(FDI)has played a huge role in promoting China’s rapid economic growth from the beginning time of Deng Xiaoping’s Talks in the South.However,due to the long-term lack of internal capital,FDI have been only used as a means to promote economic development by most local governments,which has led to ‘bottom-up competition’ and ecological environment pollution.In the new normal period of China’s economy,economic development is bound to be oriented towards high quality,gradually shifting from a crude development model of the past.Based on the above background,this paper further explored the impact of FDI on high quality economic development and the regulatory effect of environmental regulations on the basis of summarizing the literature and theories related to high-quality economic development through a combination of theoretical and empirical analysis,and put forward corresponding policy recommendation,which took the impact of FDI on high-quality economic development as the main line of research.Here,the empirical evidences for understanding the relationship between FDI and China’s high-quality economic development were provided,which had important theoretical and practical implications for how to introduce foreign investment to promote high-quality economic development in the future.The main research and findings of this paper were as follows.Firstly,the theoretical basis of FDI on high-quality economic development was summarized by combing the relevant research achievements at home and abroad from the aspects of FDI and high-quality economic development and taking into account the relevant theories and literature on the impact of FDI on economy and environment.On this basis,this paper synthesized the direction of the influence of FDI on China’s high-quality economic development and its controversies,and put forward the corresponding hypotheses based on the above issues:(I)FDI had a positive impact on economic high-quality development;(II)environmental regulation had a moderating effect on the relationship between FDI and economic high-quality development;(III)there were regional differences in the relationship among FDI,environmental regulation and economic high-quality development.Secondly,a high-quality development evaluation model was constructed to measure the economic high-quality development index using the SBM-DEA model and the GML index with a panel data of 275 prefecture-level cities in China from2007-2019 as samples.The results showed that China’s economic quality development index was on an upward trend,but which varied greatly among regions.And the high-quality development levels of coastal areas were significantly higher than those of border areas,showing a stepped spatial distribution feature.Finally,an impact factor model was constructed to investigate the influence of FDI on economic quality development and the mechanism of environmental regulation on the relationship between the two.The empirical results showed that FDI positively contributed to high-quality economic development;environmental regulation played a positive moderating role in the relationship between FDI and high-quality economic development,i.e.,the improvement of environmental regulation would significantly enhance the positive contribution of FDI to high-quality economic development.In addition,by adopting different variable measurement methods and an effective endogeneity treatment,the robustness of results in this research was tested.The empirical results indicated that the findings of this study had high credibility.On the basis of the above models and findings,the relationship among FDI,environmental regulation and high-quality economic development was further analyzed according to heterogeneity by region.The results revealed that FDI positively contributed to high-quality economic development in inland and border areas,but in coastal areas it was not significant,while the moderating effect of environmental regulation also varied significantly.The comprehensive findings suggested that the inflow of FDI could effectively enhance the level of China’s high quality economic development,which was greater in inland and border areas,and that environmental regulation was an essential moderating factor between FDI and high-quality economic development.Based on the results of this research,the corresponding policy recommendations were proposed in terms of improving the level of foreign investment utilization,controlling the efficiency of production resource allocation,reasonably regulating the degree of environmental regulation,and implementing investment attraction and dynamic revision of environmental regulation policies according to local conditions.