Environmental Regulation, Green Total Factor Productivity and Sustainable Development in China’s Border Areas: Heterogeneous Effects and Mechanism Analysis

Border regions are China’s key ecological security barriers, yet their green transition remains poorly understood because existing studies focus mainly on developed coastal and inland areas. Whether uniform national environmental regulation can achieve effects in border regions comparable to those observed in coastal and inland regions, where resource-dependent industries and structural constraints prevail, has not been systematically examined. Using provincial panel data of 30 Chinese provinces from 2006 to 2022, this study constructs an improved two-stage dynamic SBM-DDF model with differentiated pollutant damage weights to measure green total factor productivity (GTFP), and combines panel Tobit regression, structural moderating effect analysis, and subsystem mechanism decomposition to examine the heterogeneous effects of environmental regulation on green development across coastal, inland, and border regions, as well as the underlying mechanisms. The results indicate that the associations between environmental regulation and green development differ substantially across regions. Command-and-control regulation is positively associated with GTFP in coastal regions but negatively associated with GTFP in inland regions, and the border–coastal difference in this coefficient is statistically significant. Market-based regulation is significantly and negatively associated with GTFP in border regions, although the border–coastal and border–inland differences in this coefficient are not statistically significant. Mechanism tests provide suggestive evidence that multi-dimensional structural constraints and production–governance subsystem conflicts are associated with the weaker association of environmental regulation in border regions. The results are broadly robust across alternative specifications, but some coefficients—particularly for command-and-control regulation—are sensitive to whether regulatory intensity is measured in absolute or scale-adjusted terms. These sensitivities are reported and discussed in the robustness section. These findings offer conditional and exploratory evidence for differentiated environmental governance strategies tailored to regional conditions.