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Top1. Introduction
As is known to all, since the reform and opening up in 1978, China has achieved rapid economic development relying on resource endowments and labor advantages (Cui et al., 2021). However, the resource-intensive economic development pattern caused high emissions and serious pollution problems (Wang et al., 2020). According to the “BP World Energy Statistics Yearbook 2020”, as of 2019, the economic growth of China is still driven by energy, accounting for more than 3/4 of the global net growth. At the same time, China's carbon emissions caused by energy consumption have increased by 0.5%, and environmental governance is facing huge challenges (Cheng et al., 2020). To achieve the goal of sustainable economic development, the Chinese government has intensively adopted a variety of environmental regulation policies. A large number of studies have proved that the environmental regulation is an important mean for the government to control environmental pollution, which can also increase the total factor productivity (TFP) of enterprises. And therefore, the Chinese government has continuously strengthened the environmental regulations to achieve sustainable economic development as soon as possible. However, some people have voiced opposition from the perspective of balanced regional development. They claimed that China has a vast territory and there are obvious regional disparities, so the environmental regulations should be adapted to local conditions. For example, advantageous areas with good foundation for economic development and a high concentration of production factors can well avoid the problem of increased production costs for enterprises when facing environmental regulations. However, disadvantaged areas with poor economic development foundation and low concentration of production factors are unable to cope with the external pressure brought by environmental regulations, which means that the production cost of enterprises is rising and the production efficiency is declining. In this case, the gap of regional economic growth will continue to grow. From agglomeration economy perspective, the agglomeration economic effect is an important driving force for improving the TFP of enterprises. In the context of national unified environmental regulation, the agglomeration effect of advantageous areas shows three mechanisms, which are “sharing”, “matching” and “learning”. In the face of the same external shocks, they can maintain lower production costs, especially help polluting enterprises resist shocks. Zhao et al. (2019) believed that the pollution reduction has spatial economies of scale, and agglomeration can reduce the costs of pollution control and management. Therefore, under the national unified standard of environmental regulations, enterprises in advantageous areas may show higher TFP, which will widen the TFP gap between enterprises in different areas. Some people proposed to implement loose environmental regulation in disadvantaged areas to alleviate the regional diaparty. To test this advice, this paper examined the regional heterogeneity of environmental regulations on the TFP of enterprises under the framework of agglomeration economics. It is of great significance for developing countries to better balance regional development while making use of environmental regulations to “force” enterprises to develop. In particular, China is currently focusing on large-scale industrial transfer. A large number of high-polluting and low-efficiency industries has gradually shifted from advantageous eastern coastal areas to inland disadvantaged areas. Whether inland areas should implement loose environmental regulations and accept low-efficiency and high-polluting enterprises has always been a hot topic.