Effects of environmental regulation on location choice of pollution-intensified manufacturing enterprises in Wuxi City

With the deterioration of ecological environment,the location choices of manufacturing industries are becoming more restricted by environmental capacity and government regulation.This paper highlights the impact of environmental regulation on the location choices of manufacturing industries.Wuxi City is selected as a case since it has faced most intensive conflicts between economic development and environmental protection.Based on the neo-classical location choice theory of manufacturing industries and the existing literature on the evolution mechanism of industrial locations,this paper established a new analytic framework of combining both traditional factors and environmental regulation factors so as to explain the location choices of pollution-intensified enterprises in Wuxi City from 1998 to 2008.We further applied a GIS-based spatial autoregressive model to explore the effects of environmental regulation on the distribution of manufacturing industries in Wuxi City.Results showed that during 1998 and 2003 the location choices of pollution intensified enterprises were mainly affected by the traditional factors such as transportation accessibility,land prices and the development zone planning,while the influence of environmental regulation factors was not significant.However,from 2003 to 2008,the environmental regulation emphasizing water quality and channels of clean water supply showed a strong effect on the location choices of pollution enterprises.This result suggested that environmental regulation has become an important factor affecting the locations of pollution intensified manufacturing.This study provides an important reference not only for the policies of industrial structure adjustment but also for the theories about the coordinated development of urban economy and environment.