مقررات زیست محیطی و بهره وری از صنایع تولیدی ژاپن

This paper attempts to provide empirical evidence on issues concerning: (a) the effect of the stringency of environmental regulations (as measured by pollution control expenditures) on innovative activity (as measured by R&D expenditures) and on the average age of capital stock and (b) the productivity enhancement effect of environmental regulations in Japanese manufacturing industries. The empirical findings in the paper show that the pollution control expenditures have a positive relationship with the R&D expenditures and have a negative relationship with the average age of capital stock. It is also shown that increases in R&D investment stimulated by the regulatory stringency have a significant positive effect on the growth rate of total factor productivity.

Japanese local and national governments established environmental policies to combat serious industrial pollution in the 1960s and 1970s. Adopting a command-and-control approach, they set and tightened emission standards for pollutants in order to achieve environmental quality targets.1 Some articles review the performance of the regulatory approach in Japan. Weidner (1995) claims that the environmental policy for controlling emissions of sulfur oxides and nitrogen oxides from stationary sources in Japanese industries such as steel, paper and pulp and chemicals can be evaluated as a successful case. OECD (1977) argues that the stringent environmental regulations stimulated technological innovation in Japanese industries: ‘The possibilities of science and technology are such that they extend the frontiers of rationality. Costs of processes that have not yet been invented cannot be estimated. They are said to be very high or even infinite, but may well turn out to be reasonable. The Japanese experience in the field of pollution abatement lends support to the idea that to a large extent it is not technology that should constrain policy choices, but policy choices that should constrain technology (OECD, 1977, pp. 85–86)’. The OECD review of the environmental policies in Japan states that, although pollution control pushed up the production costs of the industries, the additional costs did not seriously impair the competitiveness.

This paper first examines the effect of the stringency of environmental regulations (as measured by pollution control expenditures) on R&D activity (as measured by R&D expenditures) and the average age of capital stock in Japanese manufacturing industries. A significant positive relationship between the pollution control expenditures and the R&D expenditures is found. This indicates that the pressure of environmental regulations would spur innovative activity. It is also found that the pollution control expenditures have a significant negative relationship with the average age of capital stock. This finding provides empirical evidence for Xepapadeas–de Zeeuw’s argument that regulatory stringency has downsizing and modernization effects to capital stock. The inclusion of changes in SOx charge payments in a proxy for regulatory stringency affects these results little.