Functional Mechanism and Cointegration Relation of Environmental Regulations on Industrial Structure Upgrading in Beijing, China

摘要

In recent years, China has accelerated its urbanization and industrialization processes. The traditional extensive economic growth mode of high investments, high energy consumption, and high emissions has brought irreversible negative impacts on the ecological environment. Environmental regulation can promote necessary changes in the industrial structure and improve economic structure by eliminating the negative externalities of environmental pollution and enhancing social welfare. With time series data of Beijing from 1998 to 2017, the mechanism and impact of environmental regulations on industrial structure were analysed using cointegration analysis and Granger causality test. Results show that environmental regulations can effectively realize industrial structure upgrading by inhibiting the development of high-pollution enterprises, accelerating the development of the service industry, promoting the environmental protection of enterprise production technology, and promoting the optimization of investment structures. Thus, a long-term and positive equilibrium relationship between industrial structure upgrading and environmental regulation in Beijing can be achieved. The investment in industrial pollution control per unit can drive the growth of the tertiary industry’s added value by 0.017 units. The completion of industrial pollution control investment is the one-way Granger reason for the tertiary industry’s added value to the proportion of gross domestic product. The conclusions have a certain reference value for finding out the intensity of environmental regulation in promoting Beijing’s industrial structure optimization and realizing the transformation of economic structure and coordinated development of ecological civilization construction.