Can Inspection On Environmental Protection Motivate Public Willingness To Pay For Environment Protection?

Environmental issues have become a common concern of all countries in the world.In order to realize the green and sustainable development of China’s economy,the Central Committee have put the prevention and control of air pollution on the agenda.Among them,the Inspection on Environmental Protection is the environmental regulation and practical governance practice with Chinese characteristics,which is the biggest highlight of many environmental protection measures.However,environmental protection requires the participation of the public.Public environmental protection behaviors are dominated by their own environmental awareness and play an active role in preventing environmental pollution.Nevertheless,some studies have found that,although the environmental awareness of the Chinese people has been improved,in practice,there is a lack of support for the environment.Does the Inspection on Environmental Protection have crowding out effect on public environmental protection private expenditure while increasing local environmental protection public expenditure and improving environmental governance capacity? At present,there are many literatures studying the implementation effect of the central environmental protection supervision policy from the perspective of industrial enterprises,but few literatures link the central environmental protection supervision policy with the public’s personal willingness to pay for environmental protection,and there is no relevant research to test the impact of the environmental protection supervision policy on the public’s environmental protection payment behavior.The purpose of this study is to test the effect of the implementation of the Inspection on Environmental Protection on the public’s individual willingness to participate in and pay for environmental protection,and further investigate the mechanism of the policy’s impact on the public’s willingness to pay for environmental protection under different environmental pollution regions and urban-rural differences,thus providing a scientific explanation for the impact of the implementation of this policy on the individual’s willingness to pay for environmental protection.The Inspection on Environmental Protection was launched in 2016,providing a good quasi natural experimental basis for this study.This study uses the Logit model and Differences-in-Differences method,and uses the data from the China Household Finance Survey(CHFS)in 2015 and 2017 to analyze the policy effect,and tests its robustness.The results show that:(1)The implementation of Inspection on Environmental Protection will enhance the public’s environmental awareness,and increase the probability of residents willing to participate in environmental protection by 3.35%.As the policy not only checks the polluting enterprises,but also checks the implementation of the responsibilities of the party and government leaders,and supervises the party committee and the government;In terms of the way of policy implementation,we not only attach importance to the training of leading cadres,but also are good at active interaction with the people,which has been attached great importance from top to bottom.(2)The implementation of Inspection on Environmental Protection will also reduce the willingness of people to pay for environmental protection.Compared with the regions that have not implemented the policy,the implementation of Inspection on Environmental Protection will reduce residents’ willingness to pay for environmental protection by 11.35%.As a public product of environmental protection,free riding is easy to occur.This result,to some extent,explains the crowding out effect of policies on private environmental protection expenditure while promoting public environmental protection investment.(3)The crowding out effect will be affected by the difference in the implementation effect of Inspection on Environmental Protection on the improvement of environmental pollution.After the implementation of the policy,the willingness to pay for environmental protection of people living in areas where environmental pollution is not significantly improved will be 3.36 percentage points less than that of people living in areas where environmental pollution is significantly improved.Due to the different environmental pollution conditions in the area where residents live,their individual tolerance for environmental pollution and their awareness of environmental pollution,the subjective perception of residents in areas where environmental pollution is not significantly improved will want the environment to be better,and private capital will play a role.Residents are more willing to pay for environmental protection,so that their surrounding environment can be improved,and then the quality of life can be improved.(4)The implementation of Inspection on Environmental Protection reduced the willingness of urban residents to pay for environmental protection by 13.04% and that of rural residents by 7.92%,which means that the implementation of the policy has less crowding out effect on the willingness of rural residents to pay for environmental protection.Thanks to government led targeted poverty alleviation with characteristics,giving priority to agricultural and rural development,comprehensively promoting rural revitalization,promoting urban-rural integration and other initiatives,rural residents have gradually been able to take action for environmental protection,and rural environmental pollution is still more serious than urban,so the crowding out effect of rural residents is smaller.The research of this paper has certain practical significance.First,this paper studies the net effect of the implementation of the Inspection on Environmental Protection from the perspective of the public’s personal will,breaking through the previous research paradigm of analyzing the effect of policy implementation only from the aspects of industrial enterprise government performance,and enriching the theory of the impact of the Inspection on Environmental Protection on the public’s personal willingness to pay for environmental protection;Second,this paper finds that the degree of environmental pollution will affect the implementation effect of environmental protection policies,and further finds that the crowding out effect of rural residents is smaller.The people of local governments actively respond to the policy call,solve regional environmental problems on the spot,and strive to narrow the urban-rural dual structure gap.This paper further analyzes the differences and causes of crowding out effect of the Inspection on Environmental Protection on people’s willingness to pay for environmental protection based on regional and urban and rural perspectives,which is helpful to solve regional environmental problems,narrow the urban-rural dual structure gap,and improve China’s urbanization level;Third,the research results of this paper show that environmental protection is also an important social undertaking.To solve environmental problems and take the road of sustainable development,we need to design mechanisms,actively advocate public participation in environmental protection,and transform environmental awareness into social consensus and collective action.