A Convergent Analysis on Economic Growth of Industrial Sector and Strength of Environmental Regulation

With the increasingly urgency of the environmental problems, researches on this field have become hot spot. However, there are a few scholar studies on the convergence in intensity of environmental regulation and the relationship between the differences of GDP per worker and those of intensity of environmental regulation. Based on this reason, this paper studied above issues by the panel data of industrial sectors of each province in China during 2000-2011, and got conclusions as follows: (1) Among the national group and four individual groups, only some groups existed absolute convergence in the two indexes of GDP per worker and the intensity of environmental regulation, but conditional convergence of the two indexes was existed in all groups. Specific to the convergence speed, the high-yield low-emission group per worker (group I) was slower than the high-yield high-emission group per worker (group II), the low-yield low-emission group per worker (group III) and the low-yield high-emission group per worker (group IV). (2) While the chasing group narrowed the gap in GDP per worker with group I, it was also narrowing the gap in the intensity of environmental regulation, but the convergence speed of the latter is slower than the former. However, the specific situations of the chasing group in 19 provinces are all different; there are four tendencies that are strong convergence, weak convergence, strong divergence and weak divergence.