Panel data analysis on the influence of environmental regulations on the inflow of foreign direct investment in China

From the micro level, this paper thoroughly investigates the influence of environmental regulations (ERS) on the inflow of foreign direct investment (FDI) in China. Firstly, the entropy method was adopted to comprehensively measure the ERS intensities of 283 Chinese cities at prefecture level and above in 2003-2016. Then, the Cournot model was utilized to analyze how ERS affects FDI. After that, fixed-effects model was employed to empirically examine the impacts of ERS intensities in eastern, central, and western regions on FDI inflow. The results show that: The regression results on nationwide, central, and western samples indicate that the influence of ERS variable was significantly negative. This means ERS is indeed an important consideration of foreign investors in location selection. Besides, stricter ERS hinders the inflow of FDI, which agrees with the pollution haven hypothesis. On eastern samples, stricter ERS promotes FDI inflow, that is, the situation in eastern region meets Porter hypothesis. Finally, several suggestions were presented for policymakers based on the empirical results.