Environmental Regulation and High-Quality Development in China

Abstract

This paper uses the data of 30 provincial regions in mainland China except Tibet from 2006 to 2018 to weighted measure the intensity of environmental regulation through the weight determined by the ranking of pollutant emission intensity year by year; Based on the three subsystems of economy, society and environment, this paper constructs a high-quality development measurement index system, and determines the weight year by year by entropy method, as well as measures the high-quality development level by weight; From the perspective of enterprise production decision, the influence of environmental regulation on high-quality development is theoretically deduced. Through the empirical test of two threshold models with environmental regulation intensity and per capita GDP as the threshold, it confirms each other, and empirically analyzes the impact of environmental regulation intensity on high-quality development level. The research results show that: The impact of environmental regulation intensity on high-quality development level, with the change of enterprises’ decision-making to deal with environmental regulation, has an obvious threshold effect. Before reaching the threshold, the increase of environmental regulation intensity has a negative impact on high-quality development; After reaching the threshold, the impact of the increase of environmental regulation intensity on high-quality development may have a short uncertain stage, followed by a positive impact. Government environmental regulation should be combined with the local stage to avoid the misunderstanding of blindly improving the intensity of environmental regulation; Government environmental regulation should focus on reducing the cost of cleaner production and technological innovation, and accelerate the formation of “forced“ innovation mechanism of environmental regulation, so as to give full play to the positive role of environmental regulation in promoting high-quality and high-development.