In recent years, the continuous progress of industrialization and rapid economic development have brought great pressure to the environment. Local governments have strengthened environmental regulation to protect the ecological environment. In order to measure the current status of human sustainable development, which is the ultimate goal of the sustainable development of society, this paper constructs the Human Sustainable Development Index to assess the human sustainable development of each province in China from 2005 to 2017. In addition, this paper empirically analyzes the direct and indirect effects of environmental regulation on human sustainable development. The result shows that China has made great progress in human sustainable development from 2005 to 2017. Although the provincial rankings of human sustainable development have changed little over the years, the inter-regional gap of human sustainable development is narrowing. Environmental regulation not only has a direct impact on human sustainable development, but also has an indirect impact through technology innovation. In addition, the increase in the proportion of tertiary industry can also improve human sustainable development. In the future, the government should take human sustainable development as the center, strengthen environmental regulation, promote technology innovation and industrial structure upgrading.

With the rapid development of the social economy, human development has been greatly improved. However, the gap between rich and poor still exists, which restricts the further development of society. In order to study the relationship between social security expenditure and human common development, we constructed, for this paper, the Human Common Development Index, and made a regression analysis between social security expenditure and human common development. The results showed that, in China, obvious and remarkable progress has been made in human common development. There were differences between regions—high in the east and low in the west—but the gap between regions was narrowing. There was an inverted U-shaped relationship between social security expenditure and human common development. At present, social security expenditure per capita in most provinces has not reached the inflection point. The Chinese government should pay attention to the important role of social security, optimize social security expenditure, and improve the accuracy and effectiveness of social security expenditure. In addition, the Chinese government should also improve the urbanization rate and promote economic development.