Abstract:     Environmental regulation is an effective means to protect the environment, and the relationship between environmental regulation and technological progress has always been the focus of the academic community. Existing research provides theoretical and empirical support for understanding the relationship between environmental regulation and technological progress, but it is difficult to meet the needs of the new situation of marine high-quality development: (1) Most of the existing studies ignore the rigid constraints of resources and the negative effects of environment in the process of economic development. This kind of economic growth at the cost of resource waste and environmental pollution does not meet the requirements of marine high-quality development. (2) Existing research has been carried out more in industry and other fields, but there are few researches specifically on the marine field. (3) Previous studies mostly focused on the direct relationship between environmental regulation and technological progress, and regarded the intermediate link as a theoretical "black box", thus ignoring the possible indirect relationship between environmental regulation and technological progress.In response to the above-mentioned problems, this paper takes China′s marine economy as the research object and studies the impact of environmental regulation on green technological progress. Firstly, based on relevant literature and theory, this paper analyzes the mechanism of environmental regulation on green technological progress of marine economy from the direct and indirect effects. Secondly, this paper incorporates the rigid constraint of resources and the negative environmental effect into the measurement model, and uses the mixed radial EBM model combined with the Global Malmquist-Luenberger index to measure the green technological progress of marine economy. Thirdly, this paper uses feasible generalized least squares estimation to empirically test the impact path of environmental regulation on green technological progress of marine economy. In order to ensure the unbiasedness and consistency of the empirical results, this paper re-examines the endogenous problems that may exist in the model. On this basis, this paper also introduces the limited information maximum likelihood (LIML) method to compare with the results.The study found that the direct impact of environmental regulation on green technological progress of China′s marine economy has an "inverted N-shaped" nonlinear relationship, indicating that in terms of improving the green technological progress of marine economy, it is not that the higher the intensity of environmental regulation, the more appropriate, nor the lower the intensity of environmental regulation, the more effective. It is precisely the moderate intensity of environmental regulation that is optimal for the advancement of green technological progress of marine economy. There are many indirect influence mechanisms of environmental regulation on green technological progress of marine economy. Among them, although environmental regulation has strengthened the role of industrial structure in promoting the green technological progress of marine economy, it has also inhibited the promotion of human capital and investment in science and education. In addition, environmental regulation has also restrained the negative influence of the import and export of coastal areas and the scale of land industry on green technological progress of marine economy.The above empirical conclusions provide some enlightenment for the high-quality development of China′s marine economy: It should make continuous adjustments based on actual conditions to ensure that the intensity of environmental regulation is both strict and appropriate. The government should impose heavier penalties on those enterprises that do not strictly abide by environmental regulation and have negative environmental protection attitude, and grant certain subsidies to those enterprises that carry out clean and green technology research and development, so that the enterprises which actively solve the marine environmental problems can obtain the advantages of cost and capital, and attract more enterprises to actively implement environmental management strategy and improve the green technological progress of marine economy. At present, China′s marine environmental pollution is still in the stage of large stock and range, and the market mechanism and supporting environmental protection system are not perfect. The formulation of marine environmental regulation policy should be appropriate to the stage of economic development. At the same time, the endowment conditions and capital base of coastal areas should be fully considered to refine the regulation standard.

Key words: marine economy, environmental regulation, green technological progress, direct impact, indirect impact