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

摘要： 随着中国经济发展进入新常态,“绿色、低碳、环保”成为经济高质量发展的客观要求,而有效的环境规制成为转变工业生产方式和促进经济绿色高质量发展的重要途径。本文对传统的方向距离函数加以改进,将绿色全要素生产率分解为能源效率、产出效率和减排效率三个维度,利用Tobit模型实证检验了控制命令型和市场激励型环境规制对地区绿色生产率的影响。结果发现:控制命令型环境规制对绿色生产率具有先促进后抑制的“倒U型”影响,市场激励型环境规制与绿色生产率之间则呈现“U型”关系,且二者存在明显的关联效应;现阶段的政策指向为控制污染排放,使得环境规制的作用主要体现为排放效率的改善,并没有传导到工业产出和能源消耗方面;2008年以《国家环境保护“十一五”规划》为代表的系列政策实施之后,环境规制的作用效果才得以显现;相对于中西部而言,东部地区相对领先的工业化水平和市场化进程,更有利于环境规制政策效应的有效发挥。

关键词: 环境规制, 绿色生产率, 方向性距离函数, Tobit模型