经济增长、区域环境污染与环境规制有效性——基于京津冀地区的实证分析

Environmental pollution and ecological damage are part of market failures, which require the government to adopt regulatory tools to adjust, and the impacts of environmental regulation on environmental pollution and regional economy are limited by natural conditions. In order to remove this constraint and test the effectiveness of environmental regulation, this study took the panel data of 13 cities from the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region as an example, and analyzed the impacts of environmental regulation on regional ecological efficiency by constructing a regional ecological efficiency framework that includes the ecological environment and economic development level. The results show that: (1) Compared with the financial expenditure on energy conservation and environmental protection, the monitoring of enterprises with poor environmental performance plays a significant positive role in promoting regional ecological efficiency in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, indicating that the improvement of regional ecological efficiency depends on the choice of regulatory tools, and the punitive environmental regulatory tools of government monitoring type are useful for the improvement of regional ecological efficiency in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region; (2) There is a threshold effect in the monitoring of environmentally unhealthy enterprises. With the increase of monitoring intensity, the improvement of regional ecological efficiency in the region is gradually enhanced; meanwhile, the negative impacts of fiscal expenditure of energy conservation and environmental protection on regional ecological efficiency simultaneously decrease. Therefore, employing strict punitive environmental regulatory tools can rapidly and effectively improve the environment in economically developed areas with more serious pollution, yet once the environment is significantly improved, environmental regulatory tools should switch to mainly incentive types supplemented by punitive ones, so as to effectively give consideration to regional economic growth and ecological efficiency improvement, and realize the coordinated development of regional ecological environment and economy.