Abstract
Green development is the theme of the current era. Environmental regulation is an essential means to achieve environmental benefits and improve the total green factor productivity of manufacturing facing a series of problems brought by the development model of “high investment, high pollution, and high consumption.” Appropriate environmental regulations need to be implemented to achieve economic and environmental harvest. Based on the panel data of 25 manufacturing industries from 2003 to 2016 in China, this thesis constructs a comprehensive indicator of environmental regulation and calculates the green total factor productivity, and its decomposition applied SBM directional distance function and Malmquist–Luenberger productivity index. Besides, this thesis conducts an empirical analysis of environmental regulation’s effect on green productivity in China. The main conclusions showed that the green total factor productivity of China’s manufacturing industry maintains an upward trend on the whole, and the growth of GTFP mainly depends on technological progress rather than the improvement of technical efficiency. The great differences have significant industrial heterogeneity characteristics of GTFP. A single threshold in the whole manufacturing industry, environmental regulation, and GTFP of industries are shown to be “U shape,” and the left of the inflection point is not significant. Environmental regulations and GTFP of moderation and slightly pollution industries are “U shape,” and there is no nonlinear relationship between environmental regulation intensity and GTFP in light pollution industries. Therefore, the government’s optimal environmental regulation intensity should be implemented according to the industry’s heterogeneity to prevent the phenomenon of “ineffective regulation;” it is necessary to pay attention to both technological innovation and technical efficiency.
Highlights
Since the reform and opening up, the economy has continued to develop at a high speed
The manufacturing industry is divided into heavy, moderate, and light polluting industries according to the pollution intensity, and the industrial heterogeneity of green total factor productivity caused by environmental regulation is analyzed. ird, the manufacturing industry’s environmental regulation threshold value and each subindustry are empirically tested, and a threshold model with environmental regulation as the threshold variable was established. e internal relationship between environmental regulation and GTFP in the manufacturing industry is analyzed from a practical and theoretical aspect
We can see that the GTFP is featured by a declining trend and is affected by the deterioration of technical efficiency and weak technological progress, especially in the period 2007-2008. e GTFP declined from 1.1% to 0.95%
Summary
Since the reform and opening up, the economy has continued to develop at a high speed. Excessive consumption of resources and energy and negative environmental impacts have become essential factors restricting the economy’s sustainable green development. Erefore, comprehensively improving the manufacturing industry’s green total factor productivity and reducing environmental pollution are the fundamental ways to achieve economic growth and sustainable development. Some scholars point out that the improvement of environmental regulation intensity will impose mandatory “fine cleaning” on the industry and affect the green total factor productivity (GTFP) of the industry [3]. The manufacturing industry is divided into heavy, moderate, and light polluting industries according to the pollution intensity, and the industrial heterogeneity of green total factor productivity caused by environmental regulation is analyzed. Fourth, taking the panel data of Chinese manufacturing industries as the sample, this study focuses the impact of environmental regulation on GTFP of the manufacturing industry, which complements the existing literature
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