环境规制的产业转移升级效应与银行协同发展效应——来自长江流域水污染治理的证据

The Effects of Environmental Regulation on Industrial Transfer and Upgrading and Banking Synergetic Development——Evidence from Water Pollution Control in the Yangtze River Basin

环境规制是否能实现青山绿水和金融发展的双赢是同时打赢"三大攻坚战"的关键。严格的环境规制可能带来大量高污染企业的关停并转、企业违约风险加大,对于高污染企业集聚的地区而言,甚至有可能产生银行的信贷风险。本文利用"十一五"规划中的水污染治理政策作为外生的政策冲击,以长江流域的85个城市作为样本,研究结果显示,环境规制加强不仅没有对银行业产生负面冲击,反而能显著带动地区银行业的协同发展。本文从产业转移升级视角来解释这一现象:(1)严格的环境规制使得污染程度较高的企业产值下降,由此产生的产品供给缺口转移到污染程度较低的企业。污染程度较低的企业产值提高增加了信贷需求,从而推动了银行业发展。(2)严格的环境规制也推动了地区的产业结构升级,第三产业无论是产值还是比重都出现了显著的提高,这都将增加信贷需求,促进银行业发展。

Previous studies have discussed the impact of environmental regulation on economic growth and employment,but its impact may not be limited to these two aspects.If a large number of polluting enterprises was forced to reduce or stop production under strict environmental regulations,then their balance sheets would deteriorate and they may be unable to repay the bank loans.For those regions which rely on high-pollution industries,environmental regulation will lead to a substantial increase in local corporate default and increase regional banks’credit risk.From this perspective,this paper studied the impact of environmental regulation on bank development.In 2006,the Chinese government set a chemical oxygen demand(COD)reduction target in the 11 th Five-Year Plan,which was allocated to each province.The central government assessed local officials by judging whether the emission reduction task was completed.They also implemented the accountability system and the"one vote"system,and made pollution control a hard constraint for local officials.Since then,pollution control began to receive great results.The environmental regulation system proposed by the Chinese government in 2007,which focuses on the decomposition of emission reduction tasks,assessment and accountability,and environmental supervision,has been applied ever since.Using this policy as an exogenous shock,this paper examines the impact of environmental regulation on financial development and its mechanism.The data used in this paper come from China Industrial Enterprises Database,China City Statistical Yearbook,and the list of financial licenses published by China Banking Regulatory Commission.The sample contains 85 cities along the Yangtze River Basin from 2003 to 2009.We constructed a difference in differences(DID)model,and used the emission reduction task of each prefecture-level city as the measurement of environmental regulation intensity and the number of bank branches as the explained variable.The results show that the strengthening of environmental regulation not only brings no negative impacts on the banking industry,but can significantly promote the development of the regional banking industry.The number of bank branches increased significantly under the strengthening of environmental regulation.We then conducted a series of robustness tests and placebo tests,including removing provincial capitals from the sample,changing environmental regulatory proxy variables,and adopting random assignment of emission reduction targets for 1000 times.The regression results were still robust.In order to deal with the endogeneity problems,we regarded the river area of each city and the river chief system as instrumental variables for the emission reduction target.The regression results are still valid when the loan balance is taken as the explained variable.This paper introduces two mechanisms to explain this phenomenon.(1)Although pollution control has a negative impact on polluting industries,there is heterogeneity between state-owned enterprises(SOEs)and non-SOEs.Due to the lax supervision of environmental protection by some local governments in the early years,non-SOEs neglected ecological and environmental protection in order to seek profit.However,SOEs were constrained by multiple targets and higher authorities.Thus the SOEs were more socially responsible and less sensitive to environmental costs,which made them perform better in pollution control than non-SOEs.Under strict environmental regulations,non-SOEs of high pollution levels will stop production or even shut down.The production supply gap caused by production reduction will be transferred to SOEs with low pollution levels.The growth of output of SOEs increases the demand for credit and promotes the coordinated development of regional banking industry.(2)Strict environmental regulations have also adjusted regional industrial structure.Both the output and the proportion of the tertiary industry in GDP have increased significantly,which is another important reason for the development of the banking industry.The empirical results of sub-industries show that the financial industry,real estate industry,accommodation and catering industry have experienced long-standing development under environmental regulations.