Environmental regulation, trade openness and polluting emissions: City-level empirical evidence from China

This study investigates the relationship among environmental regulation, trade openness, and pollution emissions using a two-way fixed and mediating effect model based on the panel data of 283 prefecture-level cities obtained from 2005 to 2019. The results reveal that trade openness has a significant impact on the production of polluting emissions. Environmental regulation policies can effectively reduce the adverse impact of trade openness on polluting emissions. By further investigating the intermediate mechanism, it is found that the environmental regulation policies negatively regulate the trade openness and polluting emissions, mainly by promoting industrial upgrading.