Abstract:

Under the government-led governance model, the attention of the government and its corresponding actions are very important for the effective solution of social and economic problems. To achieve high-quality development of the Chinese economy, it is necessary to balance the relationship between the environmental protection and the economic growth. Under China's parallel environmental management system, regional environmental protection agencies lack independence and local governments have the motivation and ability to intervene in the decision-making and implementation of environmental protection agencies. In addition, many public goods in the jurisdiction are provided by local governments. With limited financial funds, diverse governance objectives, and fierce horizontal competition, how to ensure that the use of environmental governance tools meets actual needs in terms of scale and efficiency depends largely on the importance that local governments attach to environmental issues. Although environmental indicators have been gradually clarified and accounted for an increasing proportion in the evaluation system of local officials, no final conclusion has yet been reached on the effectiveness of local governments' environmental governance behaviors. As a fundamental manifestation of the advantages of the socialist system with Chinese characteristics, does the government-led governance model also play an active role in environmental governance? In order to explore this issue, this paper takes the work reports of China's provincial governments from 2000 to 2016 as research samples, uses Python technology to conduct an in-depth mining of the information and the content related to environmental issues in the reports, and measures the local governments' attention on environmental governance with the help of word frequency statistics and text analysis methods. And on this basis, an empirical study is conducted on whether the regional environmental quality has been improved due to the local government's attention to environmental issues. To solve the reverse causality between the environmental quality and the local government attention of environmental governance, we use the political connection as an instrumental variable for the local government attention on environmental governance to carry out analysis. The political connection specifically refers to the consistency between the government work reports from the local district chief executive and the starting point of his/her political career. The empirical results show that the local government attention on environmental issues has indeed brought about a significant improvement in the regional environmental quality. This conclusion is still valid after solving the endogeneity problem and undergoing a series of robustness tests. In the further mechanism analysis, three common environmental governance tools are introduced. The study finds that the reason why attention of the local government can positively affect the regional environmental quality stems from the fact that the local government has selected two types of environmental governance tools with significant pollution control performance under a series of constraints, that is, to improve the environmental quality by levying pollution discharge fees and promoting the environmental legislation. At the same time, the increase in attention of the local government on environmental issues does not significantly affect the scale of the environmental protection investment, and the governance performance of the expenditure-based governance tools is not satisfactory. Although local governments have a preference for various environmental governance tools, their close attention to environmental issues does bring about governance actions to improve the environmental quality. This paper confirms that the government attaching great importance to environmental issues is very important to resolve the problems in China. The realization of green, coordinated and sustainable development requires local governments to pay more attention to environmental problems. The environmental problems that have been under criticism for a long time in the past are not unsolvable, but the government failed to pay enough attention. Therefore, the central government and various departments should increase the supervision of environmental issues, strengthen the incentive and restrictive role of environmental indicators in the evaluation of local officials, and urge local governments to pay greater attention to environmental issues. Moreover, local governments have shown notable preferences for administrative control and economic intervention in the choice of governance tools, indicating that the weaknesses in current environmental governance practices are the insufficient investment and performance of the expenditure-based governance tools. To give full play to the positive role of the environmental governance investment, and avoid the loss caused by local officials' dereliction of duty or decision-making errors, it is necessary to start with the improvement of the current environmental management system. The central government should provide more institutional and financial intervention and support, regional environmental protection agencies should strengthen the supervision and enforcement, and the people in the area should actively participate in the regional environmental protection.

Key words: Environmental Attention, Environmental Quality, Tool Selection Preferences, Environmental Governance

摘要：

本文利用Python技术对地方政府工作报告进行深度挖掘,在测度地方政府环境重视度的基础上研究地区环境质量是否因政府对环境问题的重视得到改善。实证结果显示,地方政府对环境问题的重视的确带来环境质量的显著改善。进一步的机制分析发现,地方政府的环境重视度之所以能带来环境质量改善,源于在一系列约束条件下地方政府选择具有显著治污绩效的环境立法和排污税费两个治理工具。一方面,证实地方政府重视对中国环境问题的解决非常重要,实现绿色、协调和可持续发展需地方政府提高对环境问题的重视;另一方面,通过地方政府在治理工具上的选择偏好发现当前环境治理实践中的“短板”和问题,为地区环保事业的发展提供有益的改进方向。

关键词: 环境重视度, 环境质量, 工具选择偏好, 环境治理