Industrial Economic Development, Environmental Regulation Intensity and Emissions Reduction Effect:Theoretical Analysis and Empirical Test Based on Development Pattern of Treatment after Pollution

Xu Zhiwei

Journal of Finance and Economics Vol. 42, Issue 03, pp. 134 - 144 (2016)  DOI:10.16538/j.cnki.jfe.2016.03.011

Abstract

This paper builds a theoretical model about development pattern of treatment after pollution, and takes industrial output data of 30 provinces from 2001 to 2013 as the sample to explore the relationship among industrial economic development, environmental regulation intensity and emissions reduction effect.The results show that the industrial pollutant emissions play a positive stimulation role in output growth, and the output growth also results in the increase in environmental regulation intensity, thereby proving the existence of development pattern of treatment after pollution in China.But the emissions reduction effect is still unsatisfactory as a whole owing to the insufficient environmental regulation investment and relatively low regulation efficiency.From a perspective of stage comparison, the development pattern of treatment after pollution does not change in essence in the past ten years, but the emissions reduction effectof environmental regulation has appeared gradually after 2008.From a perspective of regional comparison, almost the whole China is still in a process of "treatment after pollution", and the effect of environmental regulation is also significant only in East China.

Keywords

industrial economy; environmental regulation; emissions reduction