Impact of environmental regulations on industrial structure upgrading: An empirical study on Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region in China

Abstract

Abstract Environmental problems are among the world's major challenges. To alleviate the environmental pressure caused by rapid economic growth, many governments have implemented a series of environmental regulation policies to reduce energy consumption and pollutant emissions. While existing studies have shown that environmental regulations can affect industrial development, the impact of environmental regulations on industrial structure upgrading in regional development remains unclear. This paper studies such an impact by quantitatively analyzing the environmental policies of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region in China and provides insightful recommendations for regional integration governance. By analyzing the policy texts from 2003 to 2014, this paper defines a series of indices to quantify the policy objective of industrial structure upgrading and six types of policy measures. Based on these quantitative indices, this paper builds econometric models to study the spatial effect and time-lag effect of environmental regulations on industrial structures. The main findings include: (1) the environmental regulations in these three regions have no influence on each other, yet the upgrading of industrial structures shows significant negative spatial dependence; (2) environmental regulations have direct and indirect spatial effects on industrial structures across regions; and (3) environmental regulations have a long-term promotion effect on industrial structure upgrading, and economic measures tend to be more effective than noneconomic measures. This paper provides insights into the importance of the integrated development across regions of environmental regulations and industrial development. This paper also shows the significant effectiveness of economic measures of environmental regulations for industrial structure upgrading.