Abstract
China’s environmental problems have long been criticized. The Communist Party of China (CPC) and the government have increasingly paid attention to developing environmental protection and included the construction of an ecological civilization in the “Five-in-One” development strategy. The improvement of regional eco-efficiency is an important way to realize the coordinated development of the entire society, and environmental policy instruments are a powerful means to enhance regional eco-efficiency. This paper categorizes environmental policy instruments into mandatory, hybrid, and voluntary types. Based on panel data from 31 provinces in China from 2005 to 2015, the paper discusses the impact of environmental policy instruments on regional eco-efficiency and the means of the impact. The research shows that (1) mandatory and hybrid environmental policy instruments play a significant role in promoting regional eco-efficiency, while the role of voluntary instruments is not significant in promoting regional eco-efficiency; (2) hybrid and mandatory environmental policy instruments have negative interactions; and (3) the level of economic development will positively affect the role of hybrid environmental policy instruments in promoting regional eco-efficiency but negatively affect the role of mandatory instruments in promoting regional efficiency.
Highlights
For the past 40 years of reform and opening up, China’s economy has maintained rapid growth
The question of how to correctly address the relationship between economic development and environmental protection has become a difficult problem that must be faced by Chinese governments at all levels
Making a reasonable choice of environmental policy instruments is key for improving regional eco-efficiency [69]
Summary
For the past 40 years of reform and opening up, China’s economy has maintained rapid growth. China’s unreasonable economic structure, inefficient use of resources, and severe environmental pollution have become important factors that have constrained the long-term healthy development of China’s economy. In 2017, China’s GDP reached 82.71 trillion yuan, which was an increase of 6.9% over the previous year and accounted for 15% of the global GDP. China’s steel consumption accounts for more than 40% of the global GDP; coal and oil consumption account for more than 80% of its total energy consumption [1,2,3], which is 20% of the global consumption of coal and oil [4] and is a great waste of resources. China’s environmental problems have become increasingly prominent. In 2016, the total amount of sewage discharged in China was as high as 71.11 billion tons, and the total amount of sulphur dioxide emissions was as high as
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