Research On Innovations In Environmental Policy And Evaluation Of Its Performance

Since the reform and opening up policy implemented 30 years ago,China has achieved remarkable economic growth.Meanwhile,China is experiencing serious pollutions and major environmental accidences occur frequently,which heavily threats the economic and social sustainable development in China.The severe situation of environmental pollution partly blames to the imperfect environmental policies,as well as the system defects.As a result,there is need to innovate current environmental policies.This paper tries to throw light on these issues both theoretically and empirically.We provide a clear definition of the concepts of environmental policy and environmental policy innovation.Based on stakeholder theory,the principal-agent theory and related environmental economics theory,we argue the mechanisms of policy demand,policy supply,as well as policy option.And then,this paper puts forward the objectives of environmental policy innovation that regards industrial restructure as the intermediate objective,while the economic and environmental sustainable development as the final objective.Furthermore,the specific path how to innovate environmental policy has been proposed;that is,the integration-guided innovation,the market-guided innovation and the demand-guided innovation.By using the Input-output Table in 2010 to construct the environmental SAM as the data,we establish an environmental CGE model and take the pollution tax as an example to evaluate the performance of environmental policy innovation with three perspectives;that is,the effects on pollution abatement,economic growth and industrial restructure.When water pollution tax or sulfur tax is implemented separately,the results show that both of it will significantly reduce the relevant pollution emission,but with diminishing marginal effect with raising tax rate.It indicates that,at the pollution abatement aspect,pollution tax has been proved to be effective.On the other hand,the two types of pollution tax both lead to a decline in GDP and most of industrial sectors and this negative effect on outputs appears to be more remarkable under sulfur tax.It might be because that coal is the main source of SO2 emissions and the main energy in China's energy consumption.As a result,implementing strong constraint for SO2 emissions will cause greater impact on economic system than that of water pollution.Moreover,both of the two types of pollution tax have greater negative impact on pollution-intensity industries than on clean industries,which signifies that pollution taxes can significantly affect industrial restructuring.When water pollution tax and sulfur tax are implemented simultaneously,the pollution abatement effect is better than any pollution tax implemented separately,however,its negative impact on economic growth is also greater.Nevertheless,it is worth to note that the negative impact on economic growth is limited so that China's enterprises are able to bear the cost increase caused by more stringent environmental policies.Therefore,it is time to innovate environmental policy systems for China.