آیا ساختار استخدامی پیشرفت فنی پیشرفته محیطی را ارتقا می دهد؟  Can employment structure promote environment-biased technical progress?

1. Introduction Economic growth is usually accompanied by deterioration of environmental quality. While economic growth improves people’s quality of life, the accompanying environmental pollution and resulting degradation simultaneously lowers the same. Besides, the worse the environmental pollution, the greater its influence on economic growth. As per the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2007), the global gross domestic product (GDP) will reduce by 5% for every 4 °C rise in the global temperature. At present, the Chinese government strongly advocates a cyclic economy to construct a resource-saving and environmentally friendly society. Though a series of environmental regulations and policies have been implemented to this end, they are likely to increase the production costs of polluting enterprises, may cause significant unemployment, and aggravate the gap between the rich and the poor in China. Compared with the short-term effects of environmental regulations and policies, technical progress in energy conservation and emissions reduction is more likely to bring about long-term benefits to the society. Innovation in clean technology has become an effective way to realize a win-win situation between environmental protection and economic growth. However, though the importance of progress in environmental technology is self-evident, hardly any literature identifies the factors influencing this progress. The existing literature mostly focuses on analyzing the relationship between environmental regulations and clean technology; examples include the study of the relationship between environmental regulations and the number of patent applications by Arduini and Cesaroni (2001); Aiken et al.’s (2009) study regarding the influences of environmental regulations on pollution control costs, Popp et al.’s (2009) analysis of the economic incentives of environmental regulations on enterprise innovations, and the construction of the endogenous growth model by Acemoglu et al. (2012b) to analyze the influence of environmental policies on innovation. However, environmental regulation is an exogenous variable. Is there an endogenous variable that can affect environmental technology? Stricter environmental regulations are likely to increase unemployment, which poses serious problems for any country (Greenstone, 2002). As per the data released by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security and the annual China Statistical Yearbook, though the registered urban unemployment rate since 2002 has not increased beyond 4.3%, total unemployment has risen to more than 7.7 million, mainly due to China’s enormous population. At the end of 2014, the actual registered urban unemployment rate for China as a whole rose to 4.09%. Increasing unemployment will have tremendous impacts on the physiology and psychology of workers (Roh et al., 2014). Unemployment and the resulting unbalanced employment structure have become serious hindrances to China’s economic growth. Peroni and Gomes Ferreira (2011) considered that enterprises with a high level of competition would stimulate investments in research and development (R&D). The increased intensity of competition would stimulate technical progress. If so, can China improve its progress in environmentbiased technology by adjusting its employment structure, namely, by adjusting its employment structure in industries with weak environmental regulations or in environmentally friendly industries? One the one hand, environmental regulation raises production costs of enterprises and forces them to retrench labor, leading to considerable unemployment; on the other hand, the increasing stringency witnessed by the environmental protection industry increases the demand for labor, thus promoting employment. If the employment structure of Chinese labor undergoes a reasonable shift from the production industry to the environmental protection industry, will the unemployment rate effectively decline? Furthermore, can the increase in employment in the environmental protection industry promote environment-biased technological progress? Can we achieve sustainable development in both environmental and economic terms by adjusting the employment structure rather than implementing mandatory environmental regulation? This study attempts to answer these questions.