Impact of anti-corruption and environmental regulation on the green development of China's manufacturing industry

Abstract

The government's environmental governance may be affected by corruption and affect the implementation of environmental policies. Unfortunately, existing research only considers environmental regulations (ER) and ignores the role of anti-corruption (AC) in green development. Using China's provincial manufacturing industry data from 1998 to 2017 as an example, this study investigated the impact of AC and ER on the green development of manufacturing (MGD). This study first determined the MGD by combining the epsilon-based measure model and the Malmquist-Luenberger index. Then, a spatial Dubin model was used to handle spatial effects and a panel threshold model was employed to investigate nonlinear effects. The results showed that: (i) AC and ER significantly improved MGD, and the spatial spillover effect of MGD was 0.467. (ii) ER and MGD have a non-linear relationship, when AC is at a low level, the implementation effect of ER is low, and as AC increases and exceeds the threshold 3.105, the implementation effect of ER increases significantly from 0.094 to 0.171. To make the results robust, this study implements a robustness test by replacing variables. Finally, the policy implies that the government should pay attention to the role of AC in improving MGD and consider the spatial spillover effect of AC, and promote the implementation effect of ER on MGD.