环境规制强度与经济增长——基于生产性资本和健康人力资本视角

Research on the Relationship between Environmental Regulation Intensity and China’s Economic Growth Rate——based on Physical Capital and Human Capital Perspective

近年来,环境保护与经济增长之间的'两难悖论'引起了广泛的关注,环境规制强度如何影响经济增长的问题亟待解决。本文基于代际交替模型(OLG),将环境规制、健康人力资本及生产性资本纳入分析框架,指出环境规制通过影响健康人力资本和生产性资本投资的方式对经济增长产生正负两方面影响。当环境规制强度较低时,环境规制强度与经济增长率正相关;当环境规制强度过高时,则与经济增长率负相关,存在一个最优环境规制强度。在此基础上,利用我国1997—2015年30个省级的面板数据,通过广义矩估计进行实证研究,验证了在我国存在这种显著的'倒U型'的非线性关系。

Recently,the dilemma between environmental protection and economic growth has caused widely concerns,it is urgent to explore the influence of environmental regulation intensity on economic growth.Prior research has mainly focused on the compliance cost theory and Porter hypothesis.Important issues that have long been ignored are the effect of environmental regulations on physical capital and human capital.However,their role in promoting sustainable growth and improving the level of residents’welfare cannot be neglected.Thus,the relationship between environmental regulation intensity and China’s economic growth rate is studied in this paper from the perspective of physical capital and human capital.Based on the Overlapping Generation Model(OLG),environmental regulation,health human capital and physical capital are brought into an analytical framework.Theoretical analyses show that strict environmental regulations brought about both positive and negative influences to economic growth by reducing productive capital investment and promoting health human capital.When the intensity of environmental regulation is low,there is a positive correlation between environmental regulation intensity and economic growth,but excessive environmental regulation is negatively correlated with economic growth.On this basis,using data from China at the provincial level for the period 1997-2015,the inverted U-shaped relationship between environmental regulation intensity and economic growth is examined by GMM.It is suggested that the appropriate environmental regulations can improve the environmental quality standards without hurting the economy.