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Environmental decentralization is an institutional factor that influences the effect of ecological environment governance. Based on panel data of provinces in China from 2008 to 2015, this paper evaluates the indicators of environmental decentralization, and uses a fixed-effect model and a threshold model to test the influence of environmental decentralization and environmental regulation on environmental pollution. The results indicate that China's environmental decentralization can significantly curb environmental pollution in general. There is a U-shaped relationship between environmental decentralization and environmental pollution. Reasonable environmental decentralization can restrain environmental pollution, while excessive environmental decentralization aggravates environmental pollution. There is an inverted U-shaped relationship between environmental regulation and environmental pollution. If the intensity of environmental regulation is too low, it cannot inhibit environmental pollution, while if the intensity of environmental regulation is increased to a certain level, it can help to inhibit environmental pollution. The joint impact of environmental decentralization and environmental regulation cannot reduce environmental pollution. That is, with the enlargement of environmental decentralization, environmental regulation fails to reduce environmental pollution. The effect of environmental decentralization has significant regional heterogeneity in economic development level and emission intensity. The above conclusions have important reference value for optimizing the environmental decentralization system and formulating scientific environmental decentralization policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As urban agglomerations have become the main spatial organization form in China, it is of great significance to carry out environmental cooperative governance based on urban agglomerations. Research on the interaction of environmental regulation enforcement among cities can provide a new explanation for the competition and cooperation in terms of pollution control in urban agglomerations. This article selected three types of environmental regulation policy tools: market-incentive, command-and-control, and their combinations, and analyzed the interaction pattern of environmental regulations based on the theoretical mechanism derivation and the two zone spatial Durbin model by using the panel data of 103 cities in China. Then, the SLX model was used to explore the impact of the interaction of environmental regulations on the cooperative governance of pollution in five urban agglomerations. The results showed that the market-incentive environmental regulation was not fully implemented, which meant that some cities adopted a 'race to the bottom' strategy in response of the competition with their neighbors. After combining market-incentive environmental regulation with command and-control environmental regulation, the pattern of environmental regulation interaction between cities changed from ' race to the bottom' to 'race to the top'. This interactive characteristic was particularly significant in the Yangtze River Delta and the Chengdu Chongqing urban agglomerations. However, the 'racing to the top' characteristic of these two urban agglomerations had different effects on the intercity environmental cooperation: there was a synergy effect caused by strong spillover effect of environmental regulation implementation in the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration rather than in the Chengdu-Chongqing urban agglomeration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the pressure of environmental deterioration mounted in recent years, Chinese government has formulated a series of environmental policies and regulations with the intention of improving environmental quality. However, the effectiveness of these environmental regulations have not been carefully examined yet. This study for the first time investigates the effects of environmental regulations on the environmental performance. Using the city-level panel data of 283 Chinese cities for the period 2003–2010 and four indicators for environmental quality (the industrial waste water discharged, industrial SO2 emissions and industrial Soot emissions), this study employs the first-difference GMM method that could deal with potential endogeneity and allow dynamics to conduct the empirical estimations. Overall, the estimation results indicate that current environmental control measures and regulations have not achieved the desired goal of controlling and reducing pollution. Moreover, the direct impact of FDI on China's environment is negative, suggesting that there is evidence for the “Pollution Heaven” hypothesis. The coefficients of the interactive term of environmental regulation and foreign direct investment are estimated to be negative, which indicates that the environmental regulation is effective only when FDI is controlled for. The estimation results are basically consistent for different Chinese regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using firm establishment-level data combined with provincial socio-economic characteristic panel data in China for the period of 2011–2015, this study seeks to empirically examine the impact of environmental regulation on location choices of polluting firms. The results of the conditional logit model provide compelling evidence that environmental regulations do affect the location choice of firms in polluting industries. Instead of supporting the pollution haven effect, our results consistently confirm the Porter effect at the country level. This result is robust when taking endogeneity problem into account, adopting various model specifications and estimation strategies, using alternative measurements of environmental regulation and location choices, and subsampling excluding international political events. However, the results also show divergent effect of environmental regulation on location choices for heterogeneous firms. Specifically, polluting firms in eastern region prefer to invest in provinces with stringent environmental policies but those in other regions, especially in northeastern region, choose to locate in provinces with lax environmental regulation. While water-dependent polluting firms with a low level of footlooseness are more likely to enter locations with loose environmental regulation, air pollution-intensive firms tend to locate in provinces with tight environmental legislation. These results have policy implications for transitional China as well as other developing countries with similar experience. Image 1 • We study the impact of environmental regulation on polluting firms' location choices. • We employ conditional logit model to analyze the firm establishment-level data. • Our results consistently confirm Porter effect rather than pollution haven effect. • The result is robust to consider endogeneity problem and to various robustness tests. • Divergence effect of environmental regulation for heterogeneous firms is also discovered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]