Political Turnover,Faith-Breaking Punishment And Enterprise Pollution

Since the Reform and Opening,the major environmental accidents in China are directly related to the failure of local governments in pollution control.After the “18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China”,in order to control the environmental spillover effect brought by the “GDP-based” assessment,the central government has begun to incorporate urban environmental performance,such as ecological protection and green development into the personnel assessment of local governments.Since then,a great number of Chinese local officials have been dismissed due to their poor environmental governance.It is safe to say,this kind of environmental pollution,which is closely followed by the turnover of local officials,inevitably reflects the deep motivation of the officials themselves.So,how to examine the impact of political turnover on enterprise pollution control from the micro perspective,may help to reveal the current environmental governance dilemma in China.From the perspective of the turnover of local officials,this paper studies the incentive mechanism of local government in enterprise pollution control and its effect of pollution control.It mainly addressed the following issues:(1)Is the turnover of local officials conducive to enterprise pollution control?(2)What is the transmission mechanism of the turnover of local officials to the enterprise pollution control? Does the faith-breaking punishment meet this mediating features?(3)What mediating characteristics does faith-breaking punishment satisfy under different promotion pressures and political connections? From the theoretical perspective,based on the traditional promotion tournament theory,this paper proposes the bottom line assessment principle for environmental performance,and tries to analyze the governance motivation and incentive sources of local officials in environmental governance.From the empirical perspective,this paper takes 758 wastewater statecontrolled polluting enterprises in Jing-Jin-Ji region,Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta in 2015 as samples,and collected the replacement of 97 municipal Party Secretaries and 81 environmental protection directors in the above 48 cities,as well as the hand-collected data of faith-breaking punishment,so as to investigates the effect and mechanism of pollution violation on enterprises.The main conclusions are as follows:(1)On the whole,the turnover of local officials is positively related to the pollution of wastewater state-controlled enterprises,and the impact is only significant in the type of turnover of municipal party committee secretaries,and the turnover of environmental protection director has no impact on enterprises pollution.(2)Faithbreaking punishment plays a mediating role between the turnover of municipal Party committee secretary and the pollution of wastewater state-controlled enterprises,with a mediating effect of about 33%,and plays a masking effect between the replacement of environmental protection director and the pollution of wastewater state-controlled,with a masking effect of about 64%.Further study found that the turnover of municipal Party Secretary and environmental protection director is positively related to the faithbreaking punishment,that is,the new local officials have adopted stricter punishment.Those above conclusions are still robust after controlling the intra group correlations,controlling the frequency of political turnover,controlling the potential impact of special administrative regions,controlling the signal delay in signal transmission,as well as controlling the endogeneity.(3)Promotion pressure negatively moderates the mediation effect of faith-breaking punishment between the turnover of local officials and the enterprises pollution.With the increase of promotion pressure,the mediation effect of faith-breaking punishment on the relationship between the turnover of municipal Party Secretary and enterprise pollution decreased from 72.01% to 7.37%,and the masking effect on the turnover of environmental protection director and enterprise pollution decreased from 400.6% to 26.33%.Political connection negatively moderates the mediation effect between the turnover of local officials and the enterprises pollution.Among the enterprises with political connections,the mediation effect of faith-breaking punishment on the relationship between the turnover of municipal party secretary and the enterprises pollution is relatively lower(about 20.90%).While among the enterprises without political connections,the mediation effect of faith-breaking punishment on the relationship between turnover of local officials and the enterprises pollution is higher(about 39.09%).This conclusion is also verified by the environmental protection bureau director.Those above conclusions are still robust after considering the impact of unemployment on promotion pressure and the impact of state-owned enterprises on political connections.Based on the above analysis,this paper puts forward the following policy recommendations:(1)Improving the proportion of environmental performance in the political appraisal for local officials.In the evaluation of the promotion of local officials,we must establish and improve the long-term evaluation mechanism,gradually improve the accountability system of officials,and put an end to blindly GDP-based assessment.(2)Setting discretion weight according to local conditions.On the one hand,establishing and improving the laws and regulations on faith-breaking punishment,further increasing the scope and intensity of punishment,so as to gradually increase the marginal cost of enterprises pollution,and to reduce the probability of enterprise pollution.On the other hand,accelerating the establishment of localized local government rules,and strengthening the effective restraint of breach of relevant laws and regulations on enterprise pollution.(3)Set up promotion assessment standards based on city's development.On the one hand,taking a broad and strict economic promotion space is not only conducive to the long-term stable development of local economy,but also conducive to ensuring employment and social stability;on the other hand,gradually improve and improve the assessment and evaluation of local economy,and appropriately increase the proportion of pollution discharge,resource consumption and environmental protection,so as to ease the bottom-to-bottom competition of local governments and encourage high-quality development Not high-speed development.(4)Paying more attention to the “political asylum” effect of political-connected enterprises.In the process of local environmental governance,it is necessary to identify the polluting enterprises with political background and attach great importance to the "disciplinary immunity" characteristics of political connected enterprises.We should standardize the scope of application of the advantage of political legitimacy,and pay more attention to the environmental management ability of enterprises,rather than the level of political connection.The key innovation of this paper mainly includes the following three aspects:(1)Based on the traditional analysis framework of Promotion Tournament Theory,we construct a all new core of environmental-performance-based assessment,which is beneficial to the Promotion Tournament Theory in the new era;(2)Starting from the Promotion Tournament Theory,combined with the perspective of signal transmission,we build a new theoretical and conceptual model to provide a more extensive way to improve the theoretical hypothesis of local environmental governance;(3)From the perspective of institutional theory and legitimacy theory,we reveals a distinctive transmission path of political turnover to enterprise pollution,and make a constructive discussion on the core factors that affect the mediate path.