Evaluation Method and Empirical Study of Regional Collaborative Sustainable Development under Environmental Regulation

According to the “pollution haven hypothesis”, polluting industries may shift from developed areas to underdeveloped areas, which may lead to an unbalanced environmental regulation effect in a region consisting of several provinces. This means that the environmental regulation in various provinces will have on impact on regional collaborative sustainable development (RCSD). Therefore, this paper adds environmental regulation to the RCSD evaluation system, adopts a combination of TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution) and grey relational analysis, establishes a distance collaborative model, and uses the empirical data of the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei region (BTH region) from 2007 to 2016, evaluate the RCSD under environmental regulation. The evaluation results show that the development levels in Beijing, Tianjin, and Hebei are quite different and that there is a feature of unbalanced development; From 2007 to 2016, the level of comprehensive synergy development in the BTH region is at a steady rising stage, but the upward trend is not obvious and there is little change.