Abstract
Environmental regulation is an important means of restraining enterprises and protecting the environment. Rationalization of environmental regulatory policies can promote high-quality regional economic development. The optimization and upgrading of the industrial structure has an intermediary effect on the impact of environmental regulations on the high-quality development of the regional economy. After collating and analyzing previous research, this article proposes to classify 30 Chinese provinces into regions with higher than the national average HDI (human development index) and lower than the national average HDI based on the average HDI of Chinese provinces. We explore the mediating effect of industrial structure on environmental regulation and high-quality regional economic development. The model passed the full-sample robustness test and the robustness test with GDP as the replacement variable. The empirical results show that environmental regulations of different intensities have different effects on the quality of regional economic development. The effect of environmental regulations on development quality is mainly mediated through the transformation and upgrading of the industrial structure. Enterprises need reasonable incentives from environmental regulations to transform and upgrade. The mediating effect of the industrial structure on environmental regulations is greater in regions with below-average HDI values than in regions with above-average HDI values, which shows that the industrial structure is the mechanism underlying the effect of environmental regulations on the quality of regional economic development. This result proves that adjusting environmental regulatory policies can effectively promote the upgrading of industrial structure, thereby promoting high-quality regional economic development. Based on this, the article puts forward several policy recommendations.
Highlights
In the report of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), GeneralSecretary Jinping-Xi pointed out that “China’s economy has shifted from a stage of high-speed growth to a stage of high-quality development.” The traditional extensive development model has been gradually abandoned in the “new era”, and maintaining high quality is being used as the foundation of and key guiding ideology for economic development
Compared with the existing literature, the main contributions of this article are as follows: (1) we explain the mechanism underlying the effect of environmental regulations on high-quality economic development from a theoretical perspective; (2) through human development index (HDI) zoning, we study the differential impact of environmental regulations on the quality of regional economic development; and (3) we provide relevant policy suggestions on how to improve the quality of regional economic development and how to win the battle against pollution in the contemporary Chinese context
High-polluting industries are concentrated in the secondary industry, and clean technology industries are concentrated in the tertiary industry, and so environmental regulations promote the upgrading of the industrial structure and have an impact on high-quality economic development
Summary
In the report of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), General. One of the goals of high-quality regional economic development is to promote the optimization and upgrading of the industrial structure. It is a key path for coordinating environmental regulations and high-quality regional economic development. Environmental regulation can significantly promote economic growth, which is the claim of the famous Porter hypothesis. Environmental regulations can hinder economic growth if they are not cost-effective. There is little in the literature that provides persuasive empirical evidence based on actual conditions in China while incorporating the cost effect, the pollution refuge hypothesis, and the Porter hypothesis into a unified analytical framework. The structure of this article is as follows: Section 1 is the introduction; Section 2 describes the literature review; Section 3 provides the theoretical mechanisms and discusses the classification of environmental regulations and the analysis of the environmental regulation mechanism; Section 4 introduces the empirical model and results and discusses the data sources, variable selection, and data processing; Section 5 presents the analysis of the results, including those from the HDI partition analysis, and the robustness test; and Section 6 presents the research summary and recommendations
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