Research on the Impacts of Heterogeneous Environmental Regulations on Green Productivity in China: The Moderating Roles of Technical Change and Efficiency Change

Due to the publicly owned resource attributes of the ecological environment, the treatment and governance of the environment should be guided by governments, which are mainly represented as environmental regulations. However, whether environmental regulations affect green productivity and what effects heterogeneous environmental regulations have on green productivity are still implicit. In addition, the moderating roles of technical change and efficiency change are ignored. To examine these issues, this study investigated the impacts of heterogeneous environmental regulations on green productivity and the moderating roles of technical change and efficiency change using the dynamic spatial Durbin model based on the panel data of 30 Chinese provinces from 2000 to 2018. The results show the following: compared with efficiency change, technical change has a stronger promotion effect on green productivity in China; considering the spatial spillover effects and the temporal lag effects of green productivity simultaneously, the negative path-dependent feature is not supported any longer, while the spatial spillover effect is still the power source for promoting green productivity in China; the moderating roles of technical change and efficiency change for the nexus between heterogeneous environmental regulations and green productivity in China are partly and conditionally supported at national and regional levels; the direct and indirect effects of heterogeneous environmental regulations on green productivity at the regional level have a feature of spatial heterogeneity. This study provides both theoretical and practical implications, in particular for China, to promote green productivity from the dual perspectives of space and time.