How Do Environmental Regulation and Decentralization Interactively Affect the Green Productivity of the Construction Industry? Evidence from China

In this paper, based on the spatial panel data of 30 provinces in China from 2008 to 2019, the relationship between environmental regulation (ER), environmental decentralization (ED) and the green total factor productivity of the construction industry (hereafter GTFPCI) was investigated through the spatial Dobbin model, and the heterogeneity of the relationship between three environmental regulations and the GTFPCI under different environmental decentralization intensities was studied through a threshold panel model. The results showed that the three environmental regulations had different degrees of impact on the GTFPCI, among which market-based environmental regulations (MERs) played the most obvious role. Environmental regulation and environmental decentralization have spillover effects on the GTFPCI in surrounding provinces. On the whole, with the increasing intensity of environmental decentralization, environmental regulation plays a stronger positive role in promoting the GTFPCI. However, through a threshold analysis, it was seen that the regulatory impact of different environmental regulations on the GTFPCI are heterogeneous in different ranges of environmental decentralization intensity.