The cost of “APEC BLUE”: The impact of environmental regulation on labor demand

2018年12月15日 00:00
Fellowship Paper

作 者:张炳

发表时间:2016-08-15

概要:

       The impact of environmental regulation on labor demand is an important issue and has been widely discussed in developed countries. In this paper, we use two enterprise-level data sets – China's Environmental Statistics Database (2000-2007) and China's Industrial Enterprise Database (2000-2007) to examine the impact of environmental regulation on pollution reduction and labor demand of manufacturing enterprises using an estimation technique that pairs city-level propensity score matching (PSM) with a difference – in - differences (DID) estimator. By using balanced panel data set, we find that China’s Key Cities for the Air Pollution Control (KCAPC) policy effectively lowered SO2 emissions. Manufacturing enterprises facing the tougher environmental regulation decreased their SO2 emissions by roughly 15% relative to non-treated enterprises in the matched control group. Enterprises reduce SO2 emissions mainly through pollution prevention, which possibly lead to a job loss because of substitutive effect, rather than ‘end-of-pipe’. More importantly, the new environmental regulation significantly reduced labor demand, but the impacts were relatively small, on the order of 3-6%. Furthermore, we find heterogeneous impacts of the new regulation by type of enterprise ownership, age and industry. More specifically, we found that KCAPC policy has greater negative effects on employment in domestic privately owned enterprises and old enterprises.

关键词:Environmental Regulation, Employment, Pollution Reduction

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