This paper employs metafrontier Malmquist-Luenberger index to measure green total factor productivity and then builds panel model to investigate the nonlinear effects of both governmental and civil environmental regulation on green total factor productivity in 30 provinces of China in 2007–2016, where the threshold variables are environmental awareness and regulatory foundation. The results show that green total factor productivity takes the characteristic of cyclical fluctuation, and the magnitude and its growth rate in the eastern region are higher than those in the midwestern region. The degrees of the governmental and civil environmental regulation and green total factor productivity display single environmental awareness threshold and regulatory foundation threshold. It should be noted that the sign of governmental and civil environmental regulation on green total factor productivity will transform from negative to positive, if and only if threshold variables ascend and surpass the threshold value. Under the condition of metafrontier technology, governmental environmental awareness threshold value, based on the investigated corruption and malpractice cases by the procuratorates among every hundred thousand people, reaches 0.2158, and civil environmental awareness threshold value based on the per capita education level will attain 12.2330 years, and the corresponding regulatory foundation index threshold values are 0.0163 and 0.0154. These findings show clear policy implications: rather than continually promoting the level of governmental environmental regulation, civil performance, environmental awareness, and regulatory foundation should be considered.
This paper classifies environmental regulation into two types and constructs a theoretical framework to explore the influences of fee-based environmental regulation and invest-based environmental regulation on environmental pollution. It then establishes some dynamic spatial autoregressive nonlinear econometric models to test the theoretical hypothesis based on 30-area panel data from 2004 to 2016. The results illustrate that inverted “U” shape curve relationship exists between fee-based environmental regulation and environmental pollution, while a “U” shape curve relationship between invest-based environmental regulation and environmental pollution exists. In addition, the findings suggest that improving the proportion of secondary industry can directly promote the environmental quality while effectively control of foreign direct investment and fiscal decentralization is also indispensable. Thus, the government should make targeted research about the optimal intensity of fee-based environmental regulation and invest-based environmental regulation and make targeted enterprise policy for the environmental pollution reduce, which contains promoting the energy revolution and strengthening the depth and strength of opening-up step by step.
Based on the distinction of different types of environmental regulations, this paper attempts to test the threshold effect of environmental regulation on the total factor productivity (TFP) by employing a panel threshold model and a province-level panel data set during 2006–2016. Research results show that the influence of command-and-control and market incentive environmental regulation on the total factor productivity has a single threshold conversion characteristic of foreign direct investment (FDI) and financial scale, but the impact behavior and influence degree around the threshold are inconsistent. The effect of voluntary conscious environmental regulation on the total factor productivity has a single threshold conversion feature of human capital, and moderately enhanced intensity of environmental regulation is conducive to promoting the total factor productivity after crossing the threshold. Finally, in order to enhance the regional total factor productivity, relevant policy recommendations are proposed.
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