Can China’s Campaign-Style Environmental Regulation Improve the Green Total Factor Productivity?

Mingze Du, Tongwei Zhang and Dehui Wang ()
Additional contact information
Mingze Du: School of Mathematics and Statistics, Liaoning University, Shenyang 110036, China
Tongwei Zhang: School of Economics, Liaoning University, Shenyang 110036, China
Dehui Wang: School of Mathematics and Statistics, Liaoning University, Shenyang 110036, China

Sustainability, 2023, vol. 15, issue 24, 1-20

Abstract: The central environmental inspection policy serves as a pivotal instrument for environmental regulation in China, closely intertwined with the nation’s economic and social development into a greener model. Based on the urban data of China from 2004 to 2018, this paper employs a regression discontinuity design to empirically test the inherent mechanism of the central environmental inspection policy’s impact on green total factor productivity, and attempts to analyze its impact on technological progress from the perspective of a bias towards technological advancement. This study found that central environmental inspections can significantly improve green total factor productivity, the mechanism behind this improvement being through the enhancement of technological progress, while having a negative impact on technical efficiency. Additionally, we found that the impact of policies on technological progress is mainly through increasing the magnitude of technological progress, rather than favoring technological progress. The results of this research provide reasonable suggestions for the Chinese government to revise their environmental inspection system.

Keywords: biased technological progress; central environmental protection inspector; environmental regulation; green total factor productivity; technological progress (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/24/16902/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/24/16902/ (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:15:y:2023:i:24:p:16902-:d:1301387

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 ().