Decarbonization, Environmental Regulation, and Economic Boom: An Indicator Assessment Based on the Industrial Waste

Abstract

Energy-based economic development brings about some environmental problems, and as China’s economy shifts from rapid growth to high-quality development, the implementation of environmental regulation is crucial to achieving environmental protection and high-quality economic development. Based on the panel data of 14 prefectures and cities from 2000 to 2018 in Xinjiang, this study explored the impact of environmental regulation on high-quality economic development by constructing a comprehensive evaluation index system and using entropy method and Tobit regression model. The results show that 1) overall, each 1% increase in environmental regulation is associated with a 0.037% rise in high-quality economic development level; 2) regionally, each 1% increase in environmental regulation is associated with a 0.119% rise in high-quality economic development level in northern Xinjiang, but the effect on the southern Xinjiang is not significant; 3) each 1% increase in environmental regulation, the level of high-quality economic development decreased by 0.034% from 2000 to 2010 and increased by 0.061% from 2011 to 2018. In general, this study adds to the theoretical and empirical study on the influence of environmental regulation on high-quality economic development while providing a methodology for other economies to assess the relationship between the two.

The impact of local government competition and green technology innovation on economic low-carbon transition: new insights from China

“…When reaching a certain development stage, its contribution to economic low-carbon transition slows down, and when crossing such stage, the impact of green technology innovation on economic low-carbon transition starts to increase again. This result may be due to the fact that in the initial stage of economic green transition, in order to acquire an edge in market competition, localities must increase technological transition efforts, eliminate backward production capacity, and implement policies of clean production, energy conservation, and emission reduction, which can rapidly promote the economic low-carbon transition (Yang et al 2022a ). Once the green technology innovation reaches a certain level, the backward production capacity has been gradually eliminated.…”

“…Nie et al ( 2022 ), for example, finds that local government competition on the environment has a positive impact on green innovation, and there is a significant spatial spillover effect. Moreover, some scholars hold different views, such as Liu et al ( 2022b ) and Yang et al ( 2022a ). The latter argue that the GDP-oriented view of performance and official promotion tournaments make local governments actively reduce environmental protection, exacerbate the existence of regional market segmentation of “beggar-thy-neighbor,” worsen the competitive relationship between local governments, and crowd out the cost of technological innovation, and weaken the ability of local economies to make a low-carbon transition.…”

“…The Chinese decentralization model has the characteristics of the principal-agent relationship, which leads to the information asymmetry between the central and local governments (Yang et al 2022a ; Zhao et al 2021 ). Therefore, the superior government often selects some explicit indicators to assess the lower-level government officials.…”

Carbon Peak and Carbon Neutrality in the Building Sector: A Bibliometric Review

“…Goomi et al [112], Farzaneh et al [113], and Jing et al [114] developed low-carbon development models for different cities to evaluate low-carbon development scenarios in the city system. With the growth of economy and population, the construction area of the county seat has grown steadily [115]. Based on the data from the China Statistical Yearbook, we illustrated the changes of construction area and population size in county seat in China (see Figure 8) [116].…”

Analysis of the Urban Land Use Efficiency in the New-Type Urbanization Process of China’s Yangtze River Economic Belt

“…Table 3 demonstrates the descriptive statistics for each variable. In this study, in order to avoid the effect of the subjective weighting method on the precision of evaluation results and the problem that the comprehensive index measurement is not comprehensive because of the elimination of indicators with a low contribution rate by objective weighting methods, such as factor analysis and principal component analysis, therefore, the study used the entropy weight method [69] to calculate the N-TU level based on the comprehensive evaluation indicator system of the N-TU. The entropy weight method is an objective weighting method, which uses the magnitude of information provided by the entropy value of each indicator to determine the weight of the indicator.…”