| Since the reform and opening-up policy,China’s economy has experienced rapid development and is now the world’s second-largest economy.However,with the rapid economic development,environmental protection issues have also attracted more and more attention.General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out that it was necessary to practice the development concept that "lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets" and to insist on the harmonious coexistence of human and nature.In the report of the 19 th CPC National Congress,it was also put forward that the reform of the ecological civilization system should be accelerated and that the ecological environment system should be improved.A good ecological environment is an intricate part of the growing needs for a better life.More environmental protection laws and regulations have been implemented in this context,such as: "Environmental Protection Law","Air Pollution Prevention Law",and other special laws that have been revised successively.The "Ten Measures for Air Pollution Prevention and Control" and the "Water Pollution Prevention and Control Action Plan" and other regulatory documents have been successively formulated and promulgated.The reason behind the incomplete improvement of China’s environmental problems despite the promulgation of relevant laws is that environmental regulations include two dimensions: the formulation and the implementation.Stricter environmental regulations do not necessarily lead to environmental improvement.Robust and comprehensive enforcement is an important prerequisite for environmental laws and regulations to play a positive role.However,under China’s administrative decentralization system,there is information asymmetry between the central government and local governments,often making these policies difficult to implement effectively.In the context of a long-term emphasis on "economic construction as the core",local governments often have strong incentives to relax environmental standards,trading a sane environment for economic growth.Will strengthening environmental regulations necessarily come at the cost of economic growth? In this article,the economic and environmental benefits brought by environmental inspection have been delineated.Specifically,the establishment of the national automatic monitoring station for surface water quality was taken as the point,and the economic performance of environmental regulations was studied by clarifying the difference between the effectiveness of the automatic and manual monitoring stations.The environmental performance and its shortcomings of the "movement-style" environmental governance were evaluated through the Central Environmental Inspection.Based on the aforementioned research ideas,this article has been divided into six chapters,and the main content of each chapter is as follows:Chapter One is the introduction,mainly delving into the background,significance,research content,structural framework,and innovations.Chapter Two is the literature review,primarily relating to the literature on the relationship between central and local governments,environmental regulation and total factor productivity,environmental regulation and pollution discharge,and environmental protection target responsibility assessment system.Chapter Three starts with the changes in environmental supervision and measures amendments in the intensity of environmental regulations through the establishment of national surface water quality automatic monitoring stations and then analyzes the impact of such changes on TFP.The automatic monitoring station boosts the supervision of pollution closing to the upstream through real-time monitoring technology which differs from the manual monitoring station.Following the establishment of the monitoring station,the total factor productivity of upstream firms is significantly higher than that of downstream firms,by about 29.6%.This conclusion was proven through a placebo test,the replacement of the productivity measurement method,the changing of the matching distance,the considering of the self-selection effect of enterprise location,the comparison of the national control section,and the replacement of the Regression Discontinuity Designs.It was further revealed that the productivity difference between upstream and downstream firms caused by the establishment of automatic monitoring stations has long timeliness.The difference depends on the monitoring effectiveness of the monitoring stations.Our research proves that there is no contradiction between strengthening environmental supervision and promoting high-quality economic transformation and development,which is of substantial significance for the current ecological civilization construction and overlapping economic transition period.Our empirical research further reveals that upgrading monitoring technology and applying new technologies are important means to enhance environmental supervision.Chapter Four continues the analysis of the previous chapter and explores whether the impact on TFP is the same as the automatic monitoring station when the national control section faces strict environmental regulations.Taking the Water Pollution Prevention and Control Responsibility Assessment in Huaihe River Basin in 2005 as the research object,this article uses the firm-level data of the Annual Survey of Industrial Firms(ASIF)from 2000 to 2007,and the method of Differences-inDifferences and Regression Discontinuity Designs to investigate the Environmental Protection Target Responsibility Assessment System(EPTRAS)on the TFP of firms.It can be seen from the results of the study that the EPTRAS significantly promoted the TFP of upstream firms in the assessment section.This result remains robust after a series of tests such as placebo test and RDD.The analysis of heterogeneity shows that non-state-owned firms and areas with high incentives for promotion of officials are more sensitive to the EPTRAS.Chapter Five evaluates the environmental performance brought by the Central Environmental Protection Supervision.Since 2016,the central government has been dispatching supervision teams,one batch after another,to conduct environmental protection supervision in the provinces.In this paper,the Regression Discontinuity Designs was used to study the impact of central environmental protection supervision on the quality of air and water.Our results indicate that air quality was improved significantly during the supervision,while water quality was improved significantly during the rectification period after the supervision.A heterogeneity analysis shows that supervision had a significant impact on highly polluted areas.The results further suggest that for the continuous improvement of environmental quality,it is necessary to build a long-term governance mechanism.Chapter Six summarizes this article and analyzes its shortcomings.This paper contains the following innovations.Chapter Three delves into changes in environmental supervision and measures changes in the intensity of environmental regulations through the establishment of national surface water quality automatic monitoring stations.It subsequently analyzes the impact of such changes on TFP.Our innovation is mainly reflected in the following aspects: First,China’s environmental supervision is a shortcoming of environmental regulations for a long time.Compared with strict environmental regulations,strengthening implementation can further boost environmental regulations.Therefore,the changes in the intensity of environmental regulations can be more accurately evaluated from the perspective of supervision.Secondly,establishing the national automatic monitoring station for surface water quality is a gradual process,providing quasi-natural experiments for our analysis.Through the use of Event Study,Differences-in-Differences and Regression Discontinuity Designs,the impact of changes in regulatory intensity can be precisely identified.Third,our research discusses environmental monitoring from the perspective of the application of real-time monitoring technology.Overcoming the shortcomings of environmental regulations and improving supervision are intricately linked to the application of real-time monitoring technology.The application of realtime environmental monitoring technology allows environmental departments to easily grasp real-time environmental quality information and pollution emissions,thereby providing a basis for comprehensive supervision.Moreover,they provide solutions for the weakening of supervision caused by the different objectives of multi-level management entities(such as the central and local governments).By disclosing environmental quality information to the public online,third-party supervision of environmental pollution is promoted.Finally,this study is of important guiding significance for transforming the development mode and promoting the transformation of the economy to a high-efficiency and high-quality growth model under the background of overlapping economic transitions in the current ecological civilization establishment.Chapter Four is innovative in terms of research perspectives and methods.First,from the research perspective,this article is the first to explore the impact of China’s EPTRAS on the TFP of firms.The existing research literature on the EPTRAS mainly focuses on the discussion of its environmental performance,and there are few research literatures on its economic performance.Until now,only Chen et al.(2018)investigated its economic performance at the regional level,and the research on the relationship between the EPTRAS and TFP at the enterprise level is relatively lacking.Secondly,this article uses both DID and RDD as the research methods.Although the DID model is available for an effective identification of the average effect of EPTRAS on the firm’s TFP,its estimated value may be affected by other factors and biased.Therefore,this article further uses the RDD to evaluate it in the robustness checks,which makes the conclusion of this article more credible.Chapter Five analyzes the impact of the Central Environmental Protection Supervision on water and air quality.Although there have been previously carried out studies discussing the impact of Central Environmental Protection Supervision on air quality,none of them involves changes in water quality,and no comparison exists between water and air quality.The different modes of the influence of the Central Environmental Protection Supervision were discovered,and the conclusions have reference significance for the role of the "movement-style" environmental governance model.However,this paper also has shortcomings.First,the "Black Box" occurs to the relationship between environmental regulations and TFP.Through the analysis in Chapter Three,it can be inferred that the establishment of automatic monitoring stations has markedly improved the TFP of upstream firms.Still,due to the availability of data,the mechanism has not been discussed.Several methods but tried to no avail,such as 1,Observing the changes in the R&D of firms;however,R&D in the ASIF is only available in 2005 and beyond.No conclusion can be drawn considering the construction time of automatic monitoring stations and the amount of data.2,From the perspective of pollution discharge,in another paper(Hu et al.,2021),the discharge of pollutants in the upstream counties of automatic monitoring stations was found to have decreased.However,the relationship between the reduction of pollutant discharge and the increase of TFP is still unclear because there are two ways for firms to control pollution: pollution control in the production process and pollution control at the end of the pipeline.The former is reflected in the progress of production technology,and the latter is displayed in the increase in production costs.Moreover,it is still subjected to the limitation of sample size,and it is not possible to analyze the data after matching the ASIF and the sewage database.3,From the perspective of patent application,the patent database was matched with the ASIF,but the matching rate is still very low.Therefore,the mechanism of environmental regulation on TFP warrants further research.Second,in Chapters Three and Four,the company’s location information needs to be used.Its latitude and longitude were determined based on Baidu Maps.However,there are a few problems:1,Since the time frame of the study is from 1998 to 2007,some of these companies have since closed,so problems may be encountered in determining the latitude and longitude of the company based on the name of the company.2,Even if the company is still in operation,it cannot be confirmed whether it has relocated.In other words,the latitude and longitude information we garnered is the latest location information,which may contain errors.Third,in Chapter Five,the different impact models of the Central Environmental Protection Supervision on the water and air quality were discovered.The reason for the appearance of these completely different modes is that first,water quality improvement needs longer to take effect,so the improvement is delayed.However,this hypothesis needs to be supported by other disciplines or more detailed arguments,which have not been covered in this paper. |
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