Research on the Effects of Different Environmental Regulation Tools on China’s Industrial Water Green Use Efficiency—Comparison between the Yellow River Basin and the Yangtze River Economic Belt

Abstract

Improving industrial water green use efficiency (IWGUE) is a primary means to ensure the production, living, and ecological use of water quantity and quality, while effective environmental regulation tools are important to promote efficiency. This paper calculates the industrial water green use efficiency in China’s 30 provinces from 2010 to 2022 by the SE-SBM model and divides environmental regulatory tools into command-based, market-oriented, and voluntary types. The panel Tobit model is constructed to test the impact and differences in the effects of three environmental regulations on regional industrial water green use efficiency. The results show the following: (1) Under the constraint of undesired output, IWGUE fluctuates upward slowly in China, and the potential for improving the efficiency value is enormous, with significant regional and basin-level differences. (2) At the national level, the impact of command-based and market-oriented environmental regulations on IWGUE shows a U-shaped trend, while the positive promoting effect of voluntary environmental regulations on efficiency is not significant. (3) In the Yellow River Basin, the impact of three types of environmental regulations on IWGUE shows a U-shaped pattern. Command-based and voluntary environmental regulations have crossed the inflection point and have a significant promoting effect on efficiency, while market-oriented environmental regulations have not yet crossed the inflection point. (4) In the Yangtze River Economic Belt, the impact of command-based and market-oriented environmental regulations on IWGUE shows a U-shaped pattern, while voluntary environmental regulations have a significant promoting effect on efficiency. This study may provide a reference for tailored policy design to improve industrial water efficiency in China from the perspective of environmental regulations.