Abstract
The transformation of China's economy from extensive growth to high-quality development is essentially an increase in green total factor productivity (GTFP). China currently has a range of environmental regulation tools, and the question of whether environmental regulation can promote improvement in China's GTFP requires theoretical and empirical analysis. This article first divides environmental regulation into three types: administrative, market-based and information-based. It then builds an empirical model of the effect of environmental regulation on GTFP. Slacks based measure-data envelope analysis (SBM-DEA) and the Malmquist index are used to measure the GTFP of 30 provinces in China from 2005 to 2018, and a measurement model of the impact of environmental regulation on GTFP is established. The results show that: (1) there are significant differences in GTFP in eastern, central and western China; (2) there is a non-linear relationship between environmental regulations and GTFP.
Highlights
Since the economic program known as “reform and opening-up,” China’s traditional extensive economic methods have brought rapid economic growth through aggregate advantages
In order to examine the impact of environmental regulation on green total factor productivity (GTFP), this study first divided environmental regulation into three types and proposed relevant research assumptions based on different types of environmental regulation tools
Using panel regression models and starting from the overall level and the three regional levels, it conducted an empirical analysis of the relationships between the three types of environmental regulations and GTFP
Summary
Since the economic program known as “reform and opening-up,” China’s traditional extensive economic methods have brought rapid economic growth through aggregate advantages. Peng [5] suggested that the formulation and enforcement of the current environmental regulations restrain economic growth, and that this has led to a continuous increase in the social welfare costs of those regulations In this context, it is necessary to focus on a number of related issues: whether and how environmental regulation can promote China’s GTFP to achieve a win-win situation for environmental pollution control and high-quality economic growth; the different effects of different regulatory tools on GTFP; and changes in China’s GTFP following the increase in environmental regulation. Drawing on the DEA-Malmquist total factor productivity model and examining the impact of environmental regulations on GTFP, this article further clarifies that the effect of environmental regulation on GTFP depends on regional differences [9] It provides a reference for developing countries seeking to carry out environmental regulation and improve TFP
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