Research On The Impact Of Government Regulatory Reform On The Development Of Urban Sewage Treatment Industry

As an important part of China’s public utilities,urban sewage treatment industry plays an important role in regional urban development,social sustainable development,improving people’s livelihood and ensuring citizens’ health.Since the market-oriented reform,the urban sewage treatment industry has broken the traditional state monopoly management mode and introduced industry competition and social capital to promote the development of the industry market-oriented system.At the same time,the government,as the main body of industry supervision,tries to make up for the regulatory problems in the process of industry development through various measures,but with little effect.The defects of the government control system and the poor independence of the government regulators and the inadequate implementation of policies have resulted in the overlap of the regulators,the overlapping of the supervisory functions and the conflict of the management authority.And gradually formed two different regulatory policies: "building a unified management system" and "separating construction and management".In this context,based on the changes of government regulatory functions,it is of great significance to study the improvement of industry efficiency by the management mode of government agencies,which can optimize the regulatory system,unify the regulatory mode,promote the development of the industry,and improve the quality of water environment.Therefore,this paper studies the impact of different regulatory policies on the efficiency of municipal sewage treatment industry by combining theory with empirical analysis,which provides theoretical and practical value for promoting the development of the industry and improving the regulatory system.Specifically,the contents and viewpoints of this study are divided into the following aspects:Firstly,on the basis of analyzing the current situation and trend of the development of urban sewage treatment industry and drawing lessons from the experience of international water management system,this paper further elaborates the heterogeneous facts of China’s current sewage treatment industry supervision areas and seeks the reasons for the confusion of the industry supervision situation.The study finds that the inaccurate positioning of local governments for their own status,inadequate regulatory mechanisms and the implementation of diversified and non-uniform regulatory policies are the main reasons for the unclear responsibilities of regulators and the low performance of industry regulation.Different regulatory ideas form different ways of regulatory reform,and then form two typical models of "integration of construction and management" and "separation of construction and management".Secondly,based on the analysis of the regulatory objectives of sewage treatment industry,the impact of regulatory agencies on the development of the industry under the two different modes of "integration of construction and management" and "separation of construction and management" is theoretically analyzed.The integration of construction and management strengthens the main body of responsibility and stabilizes the supervisory team,thus saving the cost of government regulation.However,it may also have negative effects on the development of the industry,such as the aggravation of administrative risks,the out-of-control of project group management and so on,and affect the efficiency of sewage treatment.Under the mode of separation of construction and management,different supervisors can realize complementary advantages and risk sharing,but at the same time,they may also cause unclear powers and responsibilities,decentralization and overlap of functions.At the theoretical level,it is difficult to make a concrete comparison of the effectiveness of the two regulatory models.Thirdly,using panel data and panel estimation methods at prefectural and municipal levels in China from 2011 to 2015,this paper empirically analyzed the impact of "building-management integration" and "building-management separation" policies on the efficiency of urban sewage treatment industry.The empirical results show that the policy of "separation of construction and management" has a positive impact on improving the efficiency of urban sewage treatment industry.In addition,compared with the central and western regions where economic development is slower,the policy of "separation of construction and management" is more effective in the eastern region,which further proves that the policy of "separation of construction and management" is a more appropriate regulatory model under the further development of economy.At the same time,this paper analyses the impact of the "supervision integration" mode of management on the efficiency of the industry,which has a certain role in promoting the efficiency of the industry,but it is not as significant as the "separation of construction and management" mode.Fourthly,explore innovative ways to standardize the development of urban sewage treatment industry,explore the direction of reform of government regulatory agencies,and put forward policy recommendations for promoting industry development and regulatory optimization.Based on the theoretical and Empirical Study on the development of municipal sewage treatment industry in China by the reform of government regulatory agencies,this paper attempts to put forward policy suggestions from the following aspects: promoting the transformation of government regulatory agencies to the mode of separation of construction and management,establishing a perfect government regulatory system,continuing to deepen market-oriented reform,strengthening regional cooperation,and strengthening the law enforcement guarantee and the construction of social supervision system.Provide decision-making reference for the government.The innovations of this paper include:(1)This paper systematically summarizes the actual situation of the power allocation mode of the municipal and prefectural governments in the sewage treatment industry,and studies the impact of different modes of the government regulatory agencies on the efficiency of the industry,which has certain innovation in the research perspective.At present,there are regional heterogeneity in infrastructure construction and industry management of urban sewage treatment industry in China.Local governments have greater autonomy in function allocation of industry management.Therefore,under different regulatory modes in different regions,it has different impacts on regional sewage treatment efficiency,operation and supervision of sewage treatment plants and even on urban economic development.The combing of the actual situation of the regulators and the analysis of the corresponding policy effectiveness are of certain research significance for the development of the industry and the optimization of the regulators.(2)In our country,most of the existing studies on the government supervision mode of public services are based on theoretical analysis.This paper adopts the double-difference measurement method to construct the benchmark model and heterogeneous model of the impact of the separation of construction and management policy on the efficiency of the municipal sewage treatment industry,which has some innovation in the research methods.At present,the research around the water treatment industry is mostly focused on the investment and construction mode of public-private joint ventures,the operation mode of sewage treatment plants,water quality discharge standards and so on.Although a large number of literatures have evaluated the performance of public utilities government supervision from many aspects,there is no agreement on the effect of the function allocation of regulatory agencies on the performance of the industry,and there are still a lot of literatures.Controversy,this paper discusses the policy effects of different government regulatory agencies in a more detailed scope under the support of large sample data,and clarifies the policy ideas of industry regulation.