Abstract: With the advancement of marine enterprise and development of marine economy in China, the central and local governments have issued a series of policies on marine environment. Apart from economic, social and environmental factors, space factor also has significant impact on policies on marine environment in the coastal areas. Using Moran index,Spatial Lag Model and Spatial Error Model, we explore the spatial correlation of marine environmental policies in eleven coastal areas in China, and analyze the internal mechanism of spatial distribution of marine environmental policies. The analysis reveals that marine environment policies show a remarkable positive space auto-correlation in the coastal areas generally, with remarkable clustering phenomena locally. The study also shows that the traditional regression method isn't suitable for quantitative analysis of marine environment policy,but Spatial Error Model is the best choice. The total GDP of marine industry and GDP of marine tertiary industry play a positive role in environmental policy in the coastal areas, and spatial lag impact of environment policy of adjoining areas and other errors featuring spatial correlation have an inhibitory effect on the marine environment policies in a certain coastal area.

Key words: marine, environment policy, local government, Spatial Lag Model, Spatial Error Model