Abstract
The impact of environmental regulations (ER) on haze pollution control has been continuously debated in the field of sustainable development. This paper explores the direct and indirect threshold effects of ER on haze pollution, and five underlying mechanisms—technological innovation (TI), industrial structure (IS), foreign direct investment (FDI), urbanization (UR), and electricity consumption (EC)—are adopted to investigate the indirect threshold effects. Panel data, over the period 2008–2018, of 284 Chinese cities were used and the threshold effects were predicted endogenously based on the panel smooth transition regression (PSTR) model. The results showed the following: (1) For the direct threshold effect, there exists a U-shaped relationship between ER and haze pollution. ER significantly reduced haze pollution when ER < 38.86 due to “cost effects”. However, ER increased haze pollution after the threshold owing to the “green paradox”, which was not significant. (2) For the indirect threshold effect, when TI = 0.37, IS = 39.61, FDI = 7.25, and UR = 42.86, the relationships between ER and haze pollution changed. The changes and corresponding reasons for the indirect threshold effects are discussed in detail. (3) After a comprehensive analysis, the threshold effects have obvious regional distribution characteristics and internal connections. Finally, based on the results, it is essential for governments to enact appropriate environmental regulatory policies and enhance inter-regional synergies in environmental governance.
Highlights
Based on the research of Li and Ye [46] and Chen and Chen [14], first, the present study uses the text segmentation method [59] to obtain the proportion of environment-related vocabularies in the provincial government’s work report, which is aimed at controlling the heterogeneity that is caused by the length of the report
ER represents the environmental regulations, EV denotes the sum of environment-related words in the work report of the provincial government where the city i is included
TV represents the sum of all vocabularies frequencies of the entire report, and industrial structure (IS) means that the secondary industry’s added value accounts for the regional GDP
Summary
The indirect relationship between ER and haze pollution is investigated through mechanisms including technological innovation (TI), industrial structure (IS), foreign direct investment (FDI), urbanization (UR), electric power consumption (EC), and other mechanisms. When investigating the linear and nonlinear impact of environmental regulations on haze pollution, most empirical studies have adopted simplified regression models that rely on the polynomial form of the quadratic function of the explanatory variables for testing [11,20,21] These simplified models are improper for explaining the reason for the predicted relationship but are not suitable for explaining the estimated coefficient both structurally and economically [22]. (5) Using text analysis, a special environmental regulation variable is constructed to explore the haze control effect [24]
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