Research On The Impact Of Fiscal Decentralization On Environmental Protection Expenditure Efficiency

In recent years,the topic of environmental pollution and environmental protection has gradually received attention.Coordinating the development of the economy and environmental protection to achieve green development is a key issue to be solved under the new situation in China.At present,the environmental awareness of the country and the people continues to increase,and environmental protection expenditures across the country continue to increase,but the environmental quality has not improved significantly.Therefore,the government’s environmental protection expenditure efficiency is worthy of attention.Western classic fiscal decentralization theory believes that decentralization of financial power to local governments,to encourage them to provide high quality and efficient basic public services,but China’s decentralization system is different from the Western "financial federal system",in this fiscal decentralization system,the central government hopes that the country will have a better ecological environment,and will increase spending,including increasing special transfer payments to local governments to improve environmental quality,while local officials are more concerned about the region’s economy developments and opportunities for political promotion,they will choose to discount environmental expenditures and even occupy environmentally-friendly financial funds,so it will lead to inefficient supply of environmental resources.This paper explores the impact of fiscal decentralization on the efficiency of environmental protection expenditures from the perspective of fiscal system.The article mainly includes three parts.The first part is about related concepts and the introduction of basic theory,introduces the related concepts,theories of fiscal decentralization and government environmental protection expenditure efficiency,and discusses the positive and negative effects on environmental protection expenditure efficiency from the aspects of income decentralization and expenditure decentralization.The second part is empirical analysis.Chapter II analyzes the current situation of fiscal decentralization and environmental protection expenditure efficiency.Through the introduce the change of environmental management system and analyzes environmental protection expenditures,reveals the problems of local government environmental protection expenditures,and through the use of three-stage DEA method to calculate the efficiency of environmental protection expenditure of provincial government in 2007-2016,the efficiency of environmental protection expenditures of provincial governments showed that there were differences in technical efficiency values across the country,and there was room for improvement.The pure technical efficiency,scale efficiency and Malmquist index were used to illustrate ways to improve efficiency.Chapter III is the empirical analysis.Using the econometric model to explore the impact of decentralization on efficiency,specifically introduce the quadratic decentralization and the efficiency of environmental protection expenditure,and study the impact of fiscal decentralization on the efficiency of environmental protection expenditure.The results show that there is an "inverted U-shaped" relationship between fiscal decentralization and local government environmental protection expenditure efficiency.The inflection point appears at a degree of decentralization of 0.65.At present,China’s fiscal decentralization is still on the left side of the turning point,which also shows that further decentralization is conducive to the improvement of environmental protection expenditure efficiency.And the population size and urbanization rate lead to the reduction of the efficiency of environmental protection expenditure;while the level of opening up and the level of economic development promote the efficiency of environmental protection expenditure.The third part is policy recommendations,on the basis of current situation analysis and empirical evidence,the paper puts forward specific suggestions for improving the efficiency of environmental protection expenditures,including continuously deepening the reform of decentralization system,improving the transfer payment system for environmental protection expenditures,and adjusting the promotion mechanism for officials and improving the efficiency evaluation system for environmental protection expenditures.