Abstract: This paper collects panel data of 34 industrial industries in China from 2001 to 2016 and divides all industries into four groups of capital-intensive, labor-intensive, energy-intensive and technology-intensive, to explore the differences and changes of FDI′s impact and mechanism on environmental quality in different industry groups under environmental regulations. This study finds that, FDI has different characteristics on environmental quality in different industry groups: it shows a “positive U-shaped” relationship in industrial groups of capital-intensive and labor-intensive, while shows a “negative U-shaped” relationship in technology-intensive group, and has no significant impact on energy-intensive group;environmental regulation makes FDI change the size and direction of its impact path on environmental quality, and generally changes the impact of FDI on environmental quality:it leads to FDI′s impact on environmental quality in capital-intensive group changes from improving to deteriorating, leads to the impact in energy-intensive group changes from non-significant to improving, weakens the improving impact in labor-intensive group and deteriorating impact in technology-intensive group.Therefore, the intensity of environmental regulation should be set according to the characteristics of the industry to promote the improvement of FDI′s environmental quality.

Key words: environmental regulation, FDI, environmental quality, the panel data model