The Impact of Environmental Policies on the Transformation of Regional Economic Structure

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-801-6_65How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Environmental Policies; Regional Economic Structure; Udeveloped Rgions

Abstract

Amidst intensifying global climate change and increasing concerns with sustainable development, environmental policies have become one of the institutional factors intimately shaping the global patterns of economic growth and the transformation of industrial structures. Existing research shows that while environmental policies do constrain high pollution/high consumption energy industries, they can also boost green technological innovation and help to spur emerging industries. However, the economic impacts of such policies differ significantly between regions and stages of development. This paper focuses on the western regions in China, which are relatively poor in resources, with fragile production environment, and relatively low economic development, to systematically explore the following questions: whether and how environmental policies can drive green industries development and industrial structure transformation. Drawing on a regional-focused literature review, the analysis synthesizes empirical evidence from the three dimensions: overall effects of industrial structure, divergent responses of green and resource-based industries and heterogeneity of regions. Findings show that environmental policies in western China generally have a “constraint-driven” effect which contributes to green industrial development and structural adjustment mainly in the medium to long term, while short-term impacts are tended to be limited or uneven. Moreover, policy effectiveness is highly dependent on complementary policies, industrial foundations and regional development conditions. This study presents an organized picture of the role of environmental policies in the economic transformation of the region and offers some learning on how to coordinate environmental policy and industrial policy design in resource-based and underdeveloped regions.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Anbo Wu
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/10/23
TI  - The Impact of Environmental Policies on the Transformation of Regional Economic Structure
BT  - Proceedings of the 2026 2nd International Conference on Financial Innovation and Marketing Management (FIMM 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 609
EP  - 616
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-801-6_65
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-801-6_65
ID  - Wu2026
ER  -