关键词: 环境规制, 绿色生产率, 方向性距离函数, Tobit模型

Abstract: The traditional extensive development model of “high input and high emission” has worked an economic miracle since China’s reform and opening up, but it has also restricted sustainable economic and social development through ecological destruction, environmental pollution and resource shortage. Environmental protection policies are mainly divided into control command-type environmental regulation and market incentive type environmental regulation. The control command-type environmental regulation has low implementation cost, is mandatory, and produces good management and control results. However, a consequent increase in enterprise emission reduction cost may have a “crowding out effect” on productive investment, and it is difficult to effectively stimulate environmentally protection-oriented technological innovation behavior. Market-incentive environmental regulation promotes enterprises to weigh independently between emission costs and benefits through market mechanisms, and guides enterprises to carry out emission reduction technological innovation. However, such policies depend on government financial expenditure and regional institutional environment, which may lead to differentiated effects among regions. What impact different types of environmental regulation will have on regional productivity and how to measure regional green productivity more accurately in order to understand the nature of environmental regulation are the core issues to be solved in this paper.
Different from previous studies, this paper has improved the traditionally directional distance function, innovatively decomposed green total factor productivity into three dimensions of energy efficiency, output efficiency and emission reduction efficiency, and measured the environmental regulation level from the two aspects of control command type and market incentive type. Based on the inter-provincial panel data of China from 2003 to 2014, the Tobit model is used to test the influence of two kinds of environmental regulations on regional green productivity. The empirical data in this paper are collected from China Environmental Yearbook, China Industrial Economic Statistical Yearbook, China Science and Technology Statistical Yearbook and China Statistical Yearbook, and the relevant data of 30 provinces (autonomous regions and municipalities directly under the Central Government) in China from 2003 to 2014 are collected and aggregated to form a panel data set.
The empirical results from the overall sample show that the control command-type environmental regulation has a significant “nverted U-shaped” effect on green productivity. The appropriate regulation level can promote the improvement of green productivity, and the high regulation intensity will have a “crowding out effect” on productive investment. There is a “U-shaped” relationship between the market incentive environmental regulation and green productivity. When the emission collection standard is too low, enterprises will lack sufficient motivation to innovate and reduce emissions. Only when the emission cost reaches a certain level, can enterprises be forced to produce “innovation compensation effect”. According to the regression results of the interaction terms, there is an obvious correlation effect between the control command type and the market incentive type regulation policies.
Our further discussion shows that since the current policy direction of environmental regulation is to reduce pollution emissions, its effect on green productivity is mainly reflected in the improvement of emission efficiency, and has not been transmitted to industrial output and energy consumption. The phased regression from different periods shows that the effect of environmental regulation is only apparent after the promulgation of a series of policies represented by the 11th Five-Year Plan for National Environmental Protection in 2008. The heterogeneity test from different regions shows that compared with the central and western regions, the leading industrialization development level and market-oriented reform degree in the eastern region are more conducive to the effective play of environmental regulation policy effects.

Key words: environmental regulation, green total factor productivity, SBM-DDF, Tobit model