Are environmental regulations holding back industrial growth? Evidence from China

To achieve sustainable economic development, many developing countries have continuously tightened their environmental regulations; for example, the Chinese government revised some policies to protect the environment, such as the Environmental Protection Law, and levied environmental taxes. Will these regulatory tools affect the growth of the industrial economy? What are the differences in the influence of various types of environmental regulations? Based on city-level panel data from China, this paper applied a difference-in-difference (DID) model and a bootstrap panel Granger causality test to investigate the relationship between two types of environmental regulations (command-and-control environmental regulation and market-Based incentive environmental regulation) and industrial growth. The results show that (1) Command-and-control environmental regulation (CAC) has a significant inhibitory effect on industrial growth. (2) In most regions, there is no significant Granger causality between market-based incentive environmental regulation (MBI) and industrial growth. (3) Compared with command-and control environmental regulation, market-based incentive environmental regulation allows more flexi-bility for enterprises, which is more beneficial for technological innovation. Meanwhile, market-based incentive environmental regulation does little to suppress industrial growth. (c) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

The study found that command-and-control environmental regulation has a inhibitory effect on industrial growth, while market-based incentive environmental regulation has little impact on industrial growth and is beneficial for technological innovation in enterprises.