Mechanisms of Environmental Regulation’s Impact on Green Technological Progress—Evidence from China’s Manufacturing Sector

Weijiang Liu, Mingze Du and Yuxin Bai
Additional contact information
Weijiang Liu: Center for Quantitative Economics of Jilin University, Changchun 130012, China
Mingze Du: Center for Quantitative Economics of Jilin University, Changchun 130012, China
Yuxin Bai: School of Environment and Natural Resources, Renmin University of China, Beijing 100872, China

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 4, 1-23

Abstract: As the world’s largest developing country, and as the home to many of the world’s factories, China plays a crucial role in the sustainable development of the world economy regarding environmental protection, energy conservation, and emission reduction issues. Based on the data from 2003–2015, this paper examined the green total factor productivity and the technological progress in the Chinese manufacturing industry. A slack-based measure (SBM) Malmquist productivity index was used to measure the bias of technological change (BTC), input-biased technological change (IBTC), and output-biased technological change (OBTC) by decomposing the technological progress. It also investigated the mechanism of environmental regulation, property right structure, enterprise-scale, energy consumption structure, and other factors on China’s technological progress bias. The empirical results showed the following: (1) there was a bias of technological progress in the Chinese manufacturing industry during the research period; (2) although China’s manufacturing industry’s output tended to become greener, it was still characterized by a preference for overall CO 2 output; and (3) the impact of environmental regulations on the Chinese manufacturing industry’s technological progress had a significant threshold effect. The flexible control of environmental regulatory strength will benefit the Chinese manufacturing industry’s technological development. (4) R&D investment, export delivery value, and structure of energy consumption significantly contributed to promoting technological progress. This study provides further insight into the sustainable development of China’s manufacturing sector to promote green-biased technological progress and to achieve the dual goal of environmental protection and healthy economic growth.

Keywords: China’s manufacturing sector; green total factor productivity; biased-technical progress; environmental regulation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/4/1600/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/4/1600/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:4:p:1600-:d:492145

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().