ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Environ. Sci.
Sec. Environmental Economics and Management
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2025.1679971
Command-driven vs Market-oriented Environmental Regulations:Impacts on High-Quality Development of Manufacturing Industry
Provisionally accepted
- 1Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai, China
- 2Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
The manufacturing industry is a key area of environmental regulation.However,whether command-driven and market-oriented environmental regulations exert heterogeneous impacts on the high-quality development of the manufacturing industry (HQDM) remains underexplored.This study treats the command-driven low-carbon city pilot policy and the market-oriented carbon emissions trading pilot policy as "quasi-natural experiments".Firm-level data of listed manufacturing enterprises spanning 2003-2021, it adopts the double machine learning method to evaluate the influence of heterogeneous environmental regulations on the HQDM. The findings show that the low-carbon city pilot policy significantly inhibits the HQDM, whereas the carbon emissions trading pilot policy significantly promotes it.The effect of market-oriented environmental regulation on the HQDM is primarily achieved through the mechanism of technological innovation. In regions where both the low-carbon city pilot policy and the carbon emissions trading pilot policy are implemented, both command-driven and market-oriented regulations boost the HQDM,signifying a synergistic effect between them.Further heterogeneity analysis shows that the results for eastern and western areas, state -owned firms, and technology-intensive manufacturing sectors align with the baseline regression results. The conclusions of this study provide important references for the selection of carbon reduction policies, formulating differentiated emission reduction measures.
Keywords: command-driven environmental regulation, Market-oriented environmental regulation, low-carbon city pilot policy, carbon emissions trading pilot policy, high-quality development of manufacturing industry, Double machine learning
Received: 05 Aug 2025; Accepted: 16 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Lin, wang and liu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: keqiang wang, kqiangw@163.com
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.