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| Province Managing County Reform and Regional Air Pollution: Empirical Evidence from Satellite Inversion Data |
| WANG Xiaolong, CHEN Jinhuang
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| School of Finance, Renmin University of China |
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Abstract The effect of air pollution on people's lives is becoming more and more serious. Haze pollution caused by PM2.5 damages the human respiratory and cardiovascular systems and increases the risk of disease. Therefore, it is important to improve governance efficiency to increase local air pollution control. In China, the “Province Managing County” and “Strong County Expansion” are important government reforms. Exploring whether they can improve the governance structure and promote air pollution control is important both theoretically and practically.
The Province Managing County and Strong County Expansion reforms were designed to optimize the structure of the government by simplifying its levels. Theoretically, as an important public service, air pollution control is also affected by these reforms. On the one hand, the improvement in regional financial capacity brought by the reforms can help local governments improve air pollution control. On the other hand, the intensified competition caused by the reforms could lead local governments to pay more attention to higher-level assessments and reduce their investment in air pollution control. That is, the improvement in financial resources might promote regional air pollution control, while the resulting intensified competition might negatively affect regional air pollution control.
To verify whether air pollution control is consistent with these theories, this paper examines the changes in the regional air pollution situation before and after the reforms using satellite inversion data to analyze the relationship between governance reform and local air pollution control. The results show that the Strong County Expansion significantly worsened local PM2.5 concentrations, whereas the Province Managing County reform significantly suppressed them. The exploration of the mechanisms of influence shows that the reform of Province Managing County is mainly reflected in the changes in air pollution control caused by the improvement of financial capacity, while the Strong County Expansion reform is mainly reflected in changes in air pollution control caused by changes in local government competition. Further analysis shows that the more local governments attach importance to environmental pollution control, the more the reforms are conducive to the improvement of regional air quality.
The main contributions of this paper are as follows: First, this paper uses satellite data instead of ground observation data. Satellite data provide a large sample size and a long coverage period, which solves the problem of the lack of PM2.5 data for most areas in China before 2012. Second, compared with the data used in the literature, this paper effectively avoids the problems of tampering and fabricating common with ground monitoring data. Third, based on the literature, research on environmental protection governance under these reforms is still limited. To enrich research related to the reforms, this paper uses relatively comprehensive data to analyze and discuss this topic, and conducts a preliminary analysis of regional pollution control problems after decentralization.
The research conclusions show that for environmental pollution prevention, decentralization is not a once-and-for-all strategy. The improvement of regional financial capacity is more important. Matching power and financial resources is a necessary condition for perfecting the public service supply. Whether the reforms can promote the treatment of regional air pollution also depends on the importance of a region to air pollution. From the perspective of government governance, county-level governments may not have the incentives or ability to adequately address air pollution control, as it is a public service with spatial spillover. The intervention and coordination of the superior government can solve this problem. However, after decentralization, local governments' blind expansion of productive expenditures to compete for economic growth has seriously hindered environmental pollution control. Reducing pure economic growth in assessments and including environmental protection indicators, such as the implementation of green GDP, might alleviate this problem.
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Received: 20 November 2019
Published: 02 December 2020
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