Environmental regulation and green productivity growth: Empirical evidence on the Porter Hypothesis from OECD industrial sectors

Green growth has become an important development strategy for OECD countries and governments have correspondingly implemented various environmental regulation policies, whereas few studies have discussed the impacts of environmental regulation on green productivity growth in OECD countries. Based on a panel data of OECD countries' industrial sectors, this study analyzes the stringency of environmental regulation policies and measures green productivity growth using an extended SBM-DDF approach. The dynamic panel regression investigates the impacts and mechanism of environmental policy stringency on green productivity growth in OECD countries’ industrial sectors. The main results are: (i) Porter hypothesis is validated that the environmental policy has a positive impact on green productivity growth within a certain level of stringency (lower than 3.08); (ii) The impact turns to be adverse when the environmental regulation policy is stringent over a certain level, as the compliance cost effect is higher than innovation offset effect. The findings provide new empirical evidence for the strong version of the Porter Hypothesis and some implications for OECD countries to further promote green growth.