Analysis of the Influence of Heterogeneous Environmental Regulation on Green Technology Innovation

Since its reform and opening up, China’s economy has undergone rapid development and has experienced problems such as the overexploitation of resources and the destruction of the ecological environment. To achieve a balance between economic growth and environmental protection and to follow the sustainable development path, China must implement corresponding environmental regulation policies and vigorously encourage enterprises to pursue green technology innovation. In this paper, environmental regulation is divided into command-and-control, market incentive and voluntary participation. Command-and-control environmental regulation is measured using the entropy method and the logarithm of the pollution discharge fee income in each region is used as the measurement index of market-incentive environmental regulations. At the same time, the logarithm of the number of environmental protection proposals planned by the National People’s Congress and the number of environmental protection proposals planned by the CPPCC is used as the measurement index of voluntary participation in environmental regulations. Based on a regression equation of the effects of environmental regulations on green technology innovation, this paper uses the two-step system GMM method to analyze the panel data of industrial enterprises larger than a designated size in 30 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities in China from 2006 to 2017. Moreover, the paper compares the effects of command-and-control, market-incentive and voluntary participatory environmental regulations on green technology innovation. The empirical results show that command-and-control environmental regulations initially have an inverted U-shaped effect on green technology innovation and market incentive and voluntary participatory environmental regulations have a U-shaped effect on green technology innovation. A comparison of the three environmental regulation policies shows that the effect of command-and-control environmental regulation is more significant.