Cleaner Production Standards and Increased Technical Complexity for Textile Exporters

An important prerequisite for promoting sustainable development and value chain climbing of textile enterprises is to achieve a win-win situation between environmental protection and export technical complexity. Thus, based on Chinese enterprises’ microdata, this paper investigates the impact of cleaner production standards implementation on the export technical complexity of Chinese textile enterprises using a double difference method. The results show that the implementation of cleaner production standards significantly increases the export technical complexity of Chinese textile enterprises. The results of the mechanism test indicate that cleaner production standards increase export technical complexity by enhancing capital and labor inputs of textile enterprises, as well as by promoting enterprise innovation and increasing productivity. Heterogeneity analysis shows that cleaner production standards have a significant role in increasing the export technical complexity of textile enterprises in the eastern region and larger scale; it is not significant in increasing the export technical complexity of textile enterprises in the central and western regions and smaller scale; in terms of enterprise ownership attributes, it has the greatest role in increasing the export technical complexity of state-owned textile enterprises, followed by foreign and private textile enterprises. The results of this paper show that cleaner production standards, as an environmental regulation policy, can achieve a win-win situation for environmental protection and export technical complexity increase.