Environmental Regulation and Industrial Structure Change in China: Integrating Spatial and Social Network Analysis

Social networking has become a crucial factor affecting regional economic activities. Employing the panel data of the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta in China, we examine the influence of environmental regulation on industrial structure and the role that social networks play in the spillover effect. Using the social media data from the Weibo API and the geo-information of enterprises, we construct the Weibo network and the enterprise network, then we analyze the network structures by employing a social network analysis method. The empirical results find the evidence of the spillover effects of environmental regulation through the above two networks by using network linkages as weight matrices in spatial econometric regressions.