The influence of multiple environmental regulations on haze pollution: Evidence from China

Air quality in China has deteriorated continuously within the last ten years, the Chinese central government has developed numerous environmental regulations (ERs) to improve the air condition. This paper adopts three different standards to measure the ERs for studying the impacts of ERs on haze pollution. According to previous studies, the mechanism of environmental regulations on air quality of this paper are developed and empirically analyzed by system GMM (Generalized Method of Moments) method using provincial panel data from 2006 to 2016 from China. Our empirical results conclude that: (i) command-controlled regulations (ER1) and economic-incentive regulations (ER2) have nonlinear relationships with haze pollution, but the linear regression results of voluntary-consciousness environmental regulation (ER3) are not statistical significant; (ii) the effectiveness of the ERs is varied at different significance levels and most coefficients of western region are not statistical significant; (iii) the coefficients of foreign direct investment (FDI) are positive and statistical significant. However, FDI can also have a negative impact on haze pollution when ERs are fully carried out. The empirical analysis of the whole country is basically consistent with the ones of four different regions in China.