The Impact and Internal Mechanism of Environmental Decentralization on Green Total Factor Production

Abstract

Since the emergence of environmental federalism theory in the 1960s, the empirical research on it has been pursued by scholars, mainly focusing on whether a country’s environmental regulation should be centralized or decentralized. For a long time, countries have been actively exploring and putting environmental governance systems into practice for themselves, especially at present, in the face of multiple constraints of resources, environment, sustainable development power and other factors. How to build an appropriate environmental governance system and promote the level of green development by encouraging enterprises’ technological innovation is a practical problem to be solved urgently. Based on this, this paper constructs a new research framework of environmental decentralization—technological innovation—green total factor productivity (GTFP) and investigates the effect and mechanism of environmental decentralization on GTFP. The results show that environmental decentralization can reduce the quality of environmental information disclosure and inhibit the innovative output of enterprises, ultimately leading to the decrease of GTFP. Environmental decentralization has a spatial spillover effect on GTFP, which can promote GTFP in neighboring areas. This paper tries to enrich the research results of traditional environmental federalism theory, the “Porter Hypothesis”, and growth pole theory, and it provides a solution to enterprises’ financing constraint problem.