GUO Jingyun    School of Economics

ABSTRACT

In the past 30 years, China has witnessed rapid economic and industrial development. Enterprise is an important subject of economic activities, is the main force of economic development. While driving economic development, enterprises are also the main source of pollution emissions. The negative externalities of corporate pollution emissions, the lack of corporate social responsibility, the pursuit of short-term interests and other factors, coupled with the change of external economic environment, the imperfect legal system and other problems, environmental pollution is becoming more and more serious. Water pollution, air pollution and other problems seriously endanger human health and ecological balance. In recent years, the country has paid more attention to environmental problems and introduced a series of environmental protection policies and subsidy measures. Environmental regulation is a comprehensive measure taken to deal with the problem of environmental pollution, such as compulsory policy measures, environmental protection subsidies, public opinion guidance, etc., aiming at solving the problem of environmental pollution. With the strengthening of various environmental regulations, enterprises are forced to invest in environmental protection, and environmental governance has achieved remarkable results.

Taking the data of 251 A-share listed companies from 2012 to 2020 as samples, this paper makes A statistical analysis of the current situation of environmental regulation and corporate environmental investment in China, and uses the two-way fixed effect model to empirically analyze the influence of environmental regulation intensity on the scale of environmental investment of listed companies in China. Due to great difference in the economic development status of different regions in our country, the economic development level of different regions is added as the regulating variable to analyze the differences of the influence of environmental regulation intensity on the scale of environmental investment of listed companies under different economic development levels.

The results of this paper are: firstly, the intensity of environmental regulation in our country shows an overall trend of increasing before decreasing. The intensity of environmental regulation is highest in eastern region and lowest in central region. Second, the overall scale of Chinese enterprises' environmental investment is increasing year by year, but the gap between enterprises' environmental investment is large, and the overall scale also has room for improvement. Among them, the number of listed companies in the eastern region is higher, and the total investment in environmental protection is also higher. The average environmental investment of listed companies in western region is the highest, followed by that in eastern region and lower in central region. Thirdly, the increase of environmental regulation intensity promotes the increase of environmental investment scale of Chinese listed companies. Fourthly, with the addition of regional economic development level as a moderating variable, the improvement of economic development level will inhibit the intensity of environmental regulation to improve the scale of listed companies' environmental investment, that is, the impact of environmental regulation intensity on the scale of listed companies' environmental investment decreases with the increase of economic development level. Based on the above conclusions, it is suggested that the government should strengthen the implementation of environmental regulations, and carry out environmental regulations according to local conditions according to different economic development conditions. At the same time, enterprises should strengthen their own sense of social responsibility, long-term development awareness, and actively invest in environmental protection.

Read the article here:   环境规制对企业环保投资影响研究基于经济发展水平的调节效应分析 (1).pdf