Abstract: With the increasingly strict environmental regulation policies, the impacts of environmental regulation are arouse wide concern. But the accurate measurement of environmental regulation intensity directly affect the reliability of empirical analysis. Through reviewing the current research literatures, four main methods of measuring environmental regulation intensity: pollution control investment, pollutant discharge, comprehensive evaluation and natural experiment or some alternative indicators are summarized and reviewed in this paper. Based on this, the potential multidimensionality and comparability in the measurement of environmental regulation intensity are discussed and some suggestions are provided to avoid these problems according to China’s actual environmental policies. Furthermore, applying China's regional data, the corrective environmental regulation intensity and the index without correction are compared. The result shows the potential problems have a great effect on the ranking of regional environmental regulation intensity and its changing trend. So, these problems should get enough attention in empirical analysis.

摘要： 随着环境规制政策的日益严格，环境规制产生的影响受到广泛关注，而环境规制强度能否有效测度直接影响到实证分析的可靠性。通过对当前主要的国内外研究文献进行梳理，从污染治理投入、污染排放、综合评分和自然试验与替代指标四个角度对现有环境规制强度衡量的主要方法进行总结和评述。在此基础上，讨论了环境规制强度衡量中潜在的多维性和可比性问题，并基于中国环境规制的实际提出了一些规避建议。文章进一步应用中国各地区和行业的数据分别测度修正和无修正的环境规制强度指标进行比较，发现环境规制的潜在问题会对环境规制强度排名和变动趋势带来很大的影响。因此，在实证研究中，这些潜在问题应该得到重视。