Research On Policy Incentives And Effects Of Ecological Compensation Transfer Payments In River Basins

Ecological compensation is the greening of fiscal transfer payments,and the establishment and improvement of the ecological compensation system combined with vertical and horizontal is an important embodiment of the concept of green water and green mountains are golden mountains and silver mountains,and is an important part of promoting the construction of ecological civilization in the new era.China’s water resources property rights belong to the state,water administration implements a system that combines watershed management and administrative region management,and the government assumes the leading role of ecological compensation and compensation.At present,the problems of unclear ecological protection rights and responsibilities in the upper and lower reaches of the river basin,blurred pollution boundaries,and mismatch between costs and benefits are prominent,which seriously affects the overall high-quality development of the river basin,and the water pollution control of the river basin is no longer an environmental problem in the local jurisdiction,but a public problem that requires the joint prevention and governance of local governments.The ecological compensation policy of the river basin is a comprehensive policy with both ecological,economic and social attributes,and in order to avoid the deviation between the policy implementation and the policy objectives,it is necessary to further explain the contradictions and dilemmas of the responsible subjects in the process of policy implementation.At the same time,the means of vertical ecological compensation transfer payment led by the central government is difficult to sustain,the practice of horizontal ecological compensation in the upper and lower reaches of the river basin is not common,and the form of ecological compensation urgently needs to change from financial supply to independent development.Although the practice of horizontal ecological protection compensation in China’s important river basins has achieved phased results,the long-term cooperation mechanism needs to be further consolidated.This dissertation focuses on the form of compensation mainly based on intergovernmental transfer payments for ecological compensation,aims to study the incentive problem of ecological compensation policies in river basins,and essentially explores the division of expenditure responsibilities between central and local governments,and between local and local governments.Policy incentives and effects are mainly carried out through the following three contents:(1)to construct a vertical and horizontal combination of transfer payment on multi-task incentive theoretical model;(2)to quantify the incentive behavior of policy subjects to collaborate and adopt under the vertical and horizontal hierarchy;(3)to evaluate the incentive effect of cross-border horizontal ecological compensation policy.There are seven chapters in this study,and the research on policy incentives and effects follows the research idea of optimal choice of horizontal cooperation,quantifying subject collaboration and adoption,and evaluating horizontal cooperation policies,mainly focusing on chapters 4 to 6.Chapter 4 is the theoretical basis and model construction,Chapter 5 is the policy analysis of watershed ecological compensation,and Chapter 6 is the empirical analysis of horizontal ecological compensation.Among them,Chapter 4 is not only the indirect theoretical basis for the cooperation of ecological compensation policy subjects in Chapter 5,but also the direct theoretical basis for horizontal ecological compensation cooperation in Chapter 6,while Chapters 5 and 6 are explained according to the logic of the policy formulation process,policy implementation process and policy evaluation process,respectively.Therefore,the main content includes the following three aspects:The first is a multi-task principal-agent model for watershed ecological compensation transfer payments.Based on the dual development tasks of water ecological protection and economic development,this study breaks through the limitation of the principle of beneficiary compensation in the upstream and downstream of the river basin,combines the practical attributes of the two-way ecological compensation model,and constructs a multi-agent incentive mechanism for ecological compensation in the basin with vertical and horizontal combined transfer payment as the compensation method.The diversification of the arrangement of water systems in China and the pollution transfer accompanying the fluidity of water bodies,the model considers the three states of independence,mutual competition and mutual cooperation between multiple agents in the upper and lower reaches of the river basin,and explores the problem of spillover in different states.In particular,in the state of cooperation,the horizontal transfer payment incentive between agents is introduced,which deeply depicts the capital flow in the upstream and downstream of the river basin facing four different directions: reward,punishment,compensation and subsidy.Different from the previous study on the cost function,this study also considers the three correlation coefficients of cost independence,substitution and complementarity,which is convenient for exploring the influence of the combined effect of incentive coefficients on the degree of effort under different tasks.The results show that the horizontal cooperation choice between agents is the optimal incentive contract,and the cost complementarity under the horizontal cooperation state can transform the multi-task incentive disadvantage into an advantage to a certain extent,and give play to the optimal effort to protect the water ecological environment.The level of water ecological protection efforts under the cooperation alliance is not only positively correlated with the incentive coefficient of vertical transfer payments,but also with the incentive coefficient of horizontal transfer payments.This study can provide a theoretical basis for the implementation of horizontal ecological compensation in the upper and lower reaches of the river basin,and further expand and deepen the application of multi-task principal-agent theory in the incentive of ecological compensation in the basin.The second is the textual quantification of the main body collaboration and adoption of the ecological compensation policy in the river basin.Taking the formulation subjects of river basin ecological compensation policies and their policy content elements as the research objects,the collaboration-adoption analysis framework of policy subjects under the vertical and horizontal hierarchical structure is constructed by using social network analysis method and natural language processing technology,so as to explore the policy incentives of cooperation networks and citation networks in the process of policy formulation and implementation,and to quantify the inter-governmental relationship between policy collaboration and adoption.Among them,policy collaboration is quantified by the social network analysis method to quantify the cooperative relationship between policy subjects,and policy adoption is jointly summarized by explicit citation network indicators and implicit text similarity indicators.The results show that joint issuance is a common phenomenon in the field of ecological compensation in river basins,and with the evolution and change of policies,the trend of policy subject collaboration has gradually increased,the main structure of joint issuance is mainly horizontal blocks,and the cross-regional and cross-level subject collaboration incentives are relatively limited.Combined with the two indicators of policy citation and text similarity,it is found that the step-by-step management system is superior to the cross-level management system in the topdown policy adoption,while the bottom-up policy adoption is weak,and the horizontal upper segmentation and administrative boundary are important factors limiting the incentive effect of local policies.In addition,under the incentive of vertical convergence,the similarity of river basin ecological compensation policies is generally manifested as the consistency of policy bias and cross-level deviation;under the incentive of horizontal seeking differences,the similarity of river basin ecological compensation policies is reflected in the regional heterogeneity of the reproduction of different local policy content.Through the analysis of the structural and non-structural elements of the river basin ecological compensation policy literature,it breaks through the information boundary of traditional cases and qualitative research,re-examines the dilemmas and obstacles in the vertical and horizontal hierarchy in the process of policy incentives,and provides empirical support and quantification of new perspectives for the policy research of watershed ecological compensation.The third is the assessment of the policy effect of transboundary horizontal ecological compensation.Taking the pilot transboundary ecological compensation of river basins as a quasi-experiment,this study evaluates the policy effect of transboundary horizontal ecological compensation policies on water pollution prevention and control in 2006-2018 by using the time-varying difference-indifferences method.In order to measure the prevention and control of water pollution in depth,the water pollutant concentration data of the monitoring section is added on the basis of industrial wastewater discharge,and the breadth and severity of water pollution are measured in multiple dimensions.The results of the study show that cross-border horizontal ecological compensation can not only effectively reduce the discharge of upstream and downstream industrial wastewater,but also reduce the concentration of water pollutants,especially chemical oxygen demand and ammonia nitrogen,and also facilitate the mutual promotion and integration of ecological protection and economic development tasks in the jurisdiction.However,the prevention and control of water pollution is mainly concentrated in the level of industrial point source pollution,and urban domestic sewage treatment,agricultural non-point source pollution,and lake water quality and eutrophication control have not been effectively controlled.Furthermore,it was found that the water pollution prevention and control effect of different river basins was heterogeneous.This study further explores the role path of impact,and finds that the central government can effectively stimulate the collaboration and co-governance between upstream and downstream local governments in the form of concentration of power at the level of water environment monitoring.The possible research contributions of this study are reflected in the following four points:First,the perspective focuses on the vertical and horizontal combination,which is reflected in the compensation setting of vertical and horizontal transfer payments,the interaction of the subject under the vertical and horizontal hierarchical structure,and the cooperation between the vertical ecological compensation and the horizontal ecological compensation,highlighting the importance of the main body cooperation and collaborative governance.At the vertical and horizontal transfer payment level,combined with the two-way ecological compensation model in the upper and lower reaches of the river basin,the horizontal transfer payment incentive between agents is introduced;at the vertical and horizontal hierarchical level,the quantitative study of policy text measures the factual characteristics of the ecological compensation policy of the river basin from the two processes of policy formulation and policy implementation;at the vertical and horizontal ecological compensation level,on the basis of vertical ecological compensation,the incentive effect of the horizontal ecological compensation policy of the river basin is identified.Second,improve the theoretical model of horizontal transfer payment for ecological compensation in river basins and break through the limitations of quantitative policy literature citation and horizontal similarity.On the one hand,combined with the three different relationships between multiple agents in the upstream and downstream of the river basin,from the perspective of the compensation method of fiscal transfer payment,it provides theoretical support for the horizontal cooperation between the upstream and downstream of the river basin,and tries to explain the influence of the vertical and horizontal transfer payment compensation methods on the optimal effort behavior under the horizontal cooperation state of agents.On the other hand,through the policy literature,the policy citation relationship network under the vertical and horizontal level is constructed to solve the problem of the lack of explicit indicators for policy adoption,and open up new ideas for the study of large sample policy literature citations.At the same time,this study combines the unsupervised learning algorithm with the cosine similarity distance,and compares the similarity of policy texts under the vertical and horizontal hierarchy structure through the form of matrix module coding,breaks through the limitation of horizontal comparison between subjects at the same administrative level,and solves the problem of insufficient implicit indicators for policy adoption.Third,the data breaks the constraints of insufficient ecological compensation data in local watersheds in the past,and is mainly manifested as unstructured policy text data and structured water pollutant concentration data.Collecting and processing unstructured policy text data is technically demanding and laborintensive,and unstructured data has the advantages of mass quantification,uniqueness,complexity,and fine-grainedness.Mass quantification is manifested in the length and wide coverage of unstructured policy content;uniqueness refers to the generation of a structured corpus of the watershed ecological compensation policy itself;complexity is reflected in the policy citation network database generated by natural language matching;fine-grainedness is expressed as a similarity matrix between the ecological compensation policies of the watershed.The contribution of structured empirical data is mainly reflected in two aspects:one is that the data range is extended from local basins to national watersheds,breaking through the restrictions of local watersheds,and at the same time,the observation objects are refined to the prefecture-level city level,which can solve the problem of unstable estimation results caused by local samples;second,combined with dynamic crawlers and manual collation,compared with previous studies,this study has completed more perfect water pollutant concentration data.Fourth,the logical structure takes policy incentives as the main line,and the policy role path takes autonomy incentives as the driving factor.Incentives are embodied in three aspects: the design of the incentive theory model of ecological compensation policy,the quantification of incentives for policy subjects to collaborate and adopt,and the incentive effect in the evaluation process of horizontal ecological compensation policies.Under the constraints of upstream and downstream bilateral agreements and the incentives of central rewards and punishments,the central government at the level of water environment monitoring has slightly centralization of power and encouraged the autonomy of responsible entities through more objective and fair performance appraisals;on the basis of actively implementing the principles of the agreement,local governments have chosen to do their best to control water,and give full play to the policy-driven effect of autonomy incentives through the concerted efforts of upstream and downstream responsible entities to tackle tough problems and control pollution.This study helps to provide strong empirical evidence for further expanding the coverage of horizontal ecological compensation within administrative jurisdictions or the whole river basin,and supports horizontal joint water prevention and control as an effective move to fight the battle against water pollution under the construction of ecological civilization.