Abstract
Regional competition may play an important role in the balance of environmental protection and economic growth. However, it is a pending issue of whether the competition among Chinese local governments leads to a race to black development or green development. This paper aims to explore the strategic interactions in provincial development in terms of an environment-economic indicator, i.e., the pollution intensity in China from 2000 to 2013. We divide four predominant industrial pollutants into two groups according to whether the pollutant is regulated, and then test the strategic interactions among regions based on the spatial lag term by employing the spatial Durbin model. The results show that the heterogeneous factors, such as various pollutants and regional difference, may give rise to diversified competition strategies. We find that the “race to black development” hypothesis is not supported at the national level, and the “race to green development” hypothesis is established in the developed eastern regions only in terms of the regulated industrial pollutants. We also detect how pollution intensity is influenced by the direct and spatial spillover effects of environmental regulation and find that environmental legislation has been effective in reducing regulated pollutants’ pollution intensity, while the effects of environmental staff and investment are weak. Finally, some policy suggestions are discussed.
Highlights
China, the largest developing country in the world, is confronted with a dilemma of economic growth and environmental protection [1]
To make it easy to compare, we set the pollution emission scale in 2000 equivalent to the value of 100 and calculate the emission index of each industrial pollutant from 2000 to 2013 in China, which shows that there exists large difference in the variation of the emissions of the four industrial pollutants durinSgusttahiniasbipliteyr2i0o16d,.8,F1i7g1 ure 1a shows that the emission index of a kind of regulated pollut1a0notf 2(6COD) was rpeodlulucteadntssudbustrainngtiathlliys tpoearipopdr.oFxiigmuraete1lya 5s0hoinws20t1h3a.t Hthoeweemviesrs,iothneienmdeixssoiofnainkdinedx ooff SreOg2uliantcerdeased quickplyoltloutaapnpt r(oCxOimD)atwelays 1r4ed0ubceefdorseu2b0st0a6natinaldlythtoenapwparsoxreimduatceeldy g50raidnu2a0ll1y3.toH1o1w0eivner2,0t1h3e. eTmheisseimonission changinedoexf wofaSsOte2 iwncaretearseids qsuimickillayrtotoapthparot xoimf SaOtel2y. 1T4h0ebeefmoriess2i0o0n6 avnodluthmene wofaswraedstuecegdasgrhaadsuaclolynttoinued increa11s0inign s2i0n1c3e
In contrast to previous studies that focused on either environmental or economic enforcement in regional competition, this paper focuses on the results of competition in a comprehensive way
Summary
The largest developing country in the world, is confronted with a dilemma of economic growth and environmental protection [1]. If the development of a region and the assessment for provincial officials are economically oriented, local governments may ease environmental regulation stringency to attract more investment for economic growth in the competition, i.e., developing in a “dirty” or “black” way. The Chinese central government has realized the importance of green development and proposed a scientific development concept for regional development in 2003, gradually replacing the economically oriented assessment system for local officials with an environment-economic–oriented one; this change may reverse the direction of regional competition. The environment-economic–oriented assessment system may induce the subnational regions to compete for economic growth with lower environmental costs and develop in a greener way, as indicated by some studies [4,5]
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