Environmental Regulations on the Spatial Spillover of the Sustainable Development Capability of Chinese Clustered Ports

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For years, China has adopted environmental regulations in developing ports to improve their sustainability. Based on the data of Chinese ports from 2009 to 2018, this paper presents a data envelopment analysis model with subdividing input-output indicator weights and develops it further in two stages with the weight preference and the slacks-based measure, respectively. After assessing the sustainable development capability (SDC) of Chinese ports and their spatial correlation, it revealed that Chinese ports are clustered in several regions and their SDC has spilled over into their neighbors. Further study revealed the SDC is affected by environmental regulations in different ways: as a key measure among regulations to improve the SDC, voluntary regulation has a spatial spillover effect, but neither the mandatory regulation nor public media regulation can significantly improve the SDC. This suggests that the port authority should enact environmental regulations based on the port spatial difference and the port should expand its operation scale and market size and recruit more top talent, which is good for improving its productivity and reducing its carbon emissions.