Abstract
With the increasing pressure of energy exhaustion and environmental degradation, environmental regulation is considered as a strategy to achieve sustainable development. This paper specifically analyzes the mechanism of multi-dimensional environmental regulations on energy- and environment-biased technological progress, and empirically detects the differentiated impacts using China’s panel data from the period 2000–2016, employing the generalized method of moments (GMM) and a dynamic threshold model. The results reveal that: (1) command-and-control regulation (CCR) promotes energy-saving and pollution abatement technological progress. Market-based regulation (MBR) stimulates energy-saving technological progress, while informal regulation (IR) only accelerates environment conservation technological progress. (2) There are threshold effects on the relationship of environmental regulations and biased technological progress. With economic developments, CCR and MBR have positive effects on energy- and environment-related technological progress, whilst IR fails to promote backstop and pollution abatement technological progress. The clear diversity in the impacts of different environment regulations on biased technological progress provides new insights for the optimal future policy design.
Highlights
Energy exhaustion and environmental degradation are global issues attracting increasing attention
Environmental regulations were divided into command-and-control regulations (CCR), market-based regulations (MBR), and informal regulations (IR), and the different effects of environmental regulations on environmental- and energy-biased technological progress were analyzed
Because of the lack of information and the high costs of decision-making in CCR, government intervention has increased the costs of progress in non-fossil energy technology
Summary
Energy exhaustion and environmental degradation are global issues attracting increasing attention. Energy–environment-oriented technological innovation directly addresses the energy and environmental issues of a sustainable economic development to achieve the SDGs proposed by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Agenda in 2016, (mainly for SDGs 3, 6, 7, 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15), so that an ecological civilization can be constructed [10,11] Both developed countries (e.g., American, Japan, UK, Korea, Switzerland) and developing countries (e.g., China) have historically taken environmental regulation as an answer to achieve a green economy [9,12,13,14,15,16,17]. The difference of technological progress bias brought about by different environmental regulations and the influence of different environmental policies on the direction of clean technology progress are analyzed, and a variety of environmental regulation combinations and technological progress options for the sustainable development of countries around the world are provided
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