Enterprises’ Environmental Performance And Environmental Protection Policy Evaluation

Since reform and opening nearly 40 years ago,the Chinese economy has sustained a continuously high rate of annual growth about 10%.This seemingly miraculous growth has attracted the attention of many economists in the world.In particular,major efforts have been made to examine the role of efficiency and productivity in economic growth in the postreform mainland Chinese economy and hence,to understand whether China’s economic growth is sustainable or not.One reason is that China’s population and area are so huge that it will become a major economic power and change the geopolitical outlook substantially.This high-speed development is to pay a painful waste of resources and environmental pollution at the expense of the fog haze,drinking water safety,soil heavy metal pollution and other issues are concentrated exposure.Dongguan,known as the "world factory",is a typical representative of China’s reform and opening up,the rapid economic development,and the accompanying environmental problems have intensified.Economic and environmental contradictions to pollution prevention and control work is very arduous,despite the introduction of a series of increasingly stringent environmental policy,environmental law enforcement efforts are also layers of overweight,but the momentum of environmental pollution has not been reversed,but more and more serious,This means that both environmental protection policies general y do not meet the desired objectives.At the end of the 12 th Five-Year Plan and at the beginning of the 13 th Five-Year Plan,it is necessary to evaluate the effective and effective environmental policies and how to evaluate the actual effect of environmental policies.To improve the overall efficiency of environmental protection policies,to change the mode of economic development and promote coordinated development,to strengthen the construction of ecological civilization,have important practical significance.On the basic of the previous researches,this dissertation will testify empirically corporate environmental performance and environmental policy evaluation.The ultimate goal is to analyze environmental performance index(EPI)at firm level.In order to assess the environmental performance of enterprises in the traditional pollution-stack industry--pulp and paper that produce both good and bad outputs,this study utilizes data about their smoke,ammonia,sulfur dioxide,chemical oxygen demand,industrial waste water and air to construct the EPI.As an empirical application,the method is applied to a case study of the pulp and paper industry in Dongguan,China,from 2003 to 2009,to demonstrate how the EPI can provide initial perspectives on trends in multiple emissions by pulp and paper mil s.Although each of the approaches has strengths and weaknesses,DEA has often been criticized because it is “deterministic” and fails to account for noise in the data.With too many missing values in the original data,we delete the enterprises whose data can’t be recovered and use a Bayesian approach to impute the rest.Furthermore,this paper also presents smoothed bootstrap methodology for constructing confidence intervals for the weighted and unweighted geometric means of EPI and econometrically estimated industry index through part of enterprises.The procedure is nonparametric since no distributional assumptions are required.This analysis can serve as a benchmark for current pulp and paper making operations,and the findings are employed to draw policy implications for environmental protection and shed light on sustainable development in the pulp and paper industry.The main conclusions are as follows: the average rate of growth in EP is positive during the sample period.With four sets of data matched with one another,this paper built a unique plant-level database containing enterprise basic information,geographical coordinates,production as well as pollutants information,by geocoding each plant and geographic boundaries of the policy designated areas.Based on the consolidated industrial enterprises performance and pollution micro panel data,we used the policy of Environmental-friendly Manufacturing Zones in Dongguan as a quasi-natural experiment,and proposed a framework including DID,DDD,Matching DD,Nonlinear DD methods and a series of robust tests,to assess the impacts of the EMZ policy on plants’ environmental performance from the dimensions of space and time.The study found that,the EMZ policy did improve the environmental performance of plants inside the zones remarkably,especially in dealing with waste water,waste gas,COD and nitrogen oxygen pollution problems;through the radiation effect,the policy also contributed to the surrounding enterprises outside the zone environmental performance improvement,and the radiation decayed with distance;in the long term,the environmental performance corresponding to some pollutants has been improved;these empirical results remain robust across statistical tests of multi-perspectives.This means that the implementation of rigorous,reasonable environmental protection policy,to achieve green economic development model of high production growth and low pollution,is entirely possible.This study provides a micro level empirical evidence for the effects of regional environmental policy implementation and sheds lights on the effectiveness of place-based environment regulations.