Dying to Survive : Environmental Regulation and Industrial Accidents
China has experienced a sharp increase in industrial accidents in recent years. Although Chinese government constantly stresses that production safety is above everything and has recently endeavored to reduce industrial accidents by implementing strict production safety regulatory policies, no significant improvement has been achieved. In this study, we investigate the deep reason of China’s increasingly worse production safety situation. We argue that China’s tightening environmental regulation after 2013 may have aggravated the production safety hazard among firms of the polluting industries, which are the primary target of the environmental regulation and are also susceptible to industrial accidents. Specifically, the environmental regulation may have squeezed the living space for pollution-intensive firms, and in order to survive, these firms may have to cut down precautionary expenditures on production safety, which could ultimately lead to more industrial accidents. With a data set collected from the WISENEWS, by employing a difference-in differences (DID) strategy, we find that that the number of industrial accidents in the polluting industries increases by more than 50% compared with the non-polluting industries after 2013 when China tightened its environmental regulation, and such effects are even more dramatic in the 48 key regulatory cities which face most strict regulations. Further mechanism analysis shows that pollution-intensive firms face a tradeoff between the expenditures on cleaner production and production safety. To sum up, the environmental regulation provides strong disincentive for pollution-intensive firms to invest in production safety and thus aggravates the production safety situation for these originally accident-prone polluting industries. Our study highlights the additional cost of environmental regulation that has been completely ignored in the literature, that is, it could generate severe industrial accidents and make our society less secure
Year of publication: |
2022
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Authors: | Wang, Xuebo |
Publisher: |
[S.l.] : SSRN |
Description of contents: | Abstract [papers.ssrn.com] |
Saved in:
Extent: | 1 Online-Ressource |
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Type of publication: | Book / Working Paper |
Language: | English |
Notes: | Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments May 14, 2022 erstellt Volltext nicht verfügbar |
Classification: | Q52 - Pollution Control Costs; Distributional Effects |
Source: | ECONIS - Online Catalogue of the ZBW |
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014084365
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