Research On The Fiscal Expenditure On Energy Conservation And Environmental Protection Of China

"The prosperity of ecology leads to the prosperity of civilization,while the decline of ecology leads to the decline of civilization." The construction and development of ecological civilization is a major issue concerning national destiny and people's well-being.Facts have proved that China's former "treatment after pollution" economic development mode led to the accumulation of environmental problems over the years,laying hidden dangers for sustainable development.Nowadays,China's economy is facing multiple challenges,such as growth rate shift and structural adjustment.At the same time,the environmental load has reached a critical level——dense smog,water pollution,heavy metal in soil and many other environmental problems appear frequently,which not only bring great pressure to the restoration work,but also cause serious damage to national health.In order to transform the unsustainable development mode,promote ecological improvement and resource conservation,China has paid increasing attention to the environmental problems.Especially since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China,the environmental problems have been raised to an unprecedented height.General Secretary Xi Jinping has timely put forward a series of new views on ecological civilization construction,such as "lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets","good ecological environment is the well-being of people's livelihood","environmental protection and governance should focus on solving prominent environmental problems that harm people's health" and so on.Implementing the concept of ecological civilization development in the new era and enhancing the intensity of environmental governance cannot be achieved without the support of fiscal expenditure on energy conservation and environmental protection.Facing the increasing expenditure scale,it is worth careful consideration and examination finding out the effects,efficiency and optimization space of fiscal expenditure on energy conservation and environmental protection.Focusing on China's fiscal expenditure on energy conservation and environmental protection,this paper first expounds the necessity of government intervention in the field of energy and environment based on economic theories of externality,sustainable development and public goods,then illustrates the mechanism of the expenditure to improve the ecological environment and promote national health in the context of ecological civilization construction in the new era.Secondly,combined with the analysis of the development situation and existing shortcomings of the expenditure,the paper verifies the actual effects of the expenditure on ecological civilization construction from the perspective of environment and health,and further calculates the efficiency of Chinese provincial governments in using the fiscal funds.Finally,suggestions for improvement are put forward for the problems derived from normative analysis and empirical analysis,with a view to optimizing the management mode of energy conservation and environmental protection fiscal funds and maximizing its positive effects.This paper consists of six chapters.Chapter 1 is the introduction.Starting with the severe environmental situation in China and the positive attitude of the government,this chapter describes the background and significance of the study,clarifies the research object,defines fundamental concepts,reviews the relevant literature at home and abroad,and introduces the structure,research methods,innovation and shortcomings of this paper.Chapter 2 is the theoretical connotation and mechanism of fiscal expenditure on energy conservation and environmental protection.Based on the externality theory,sustainable development theory and public goods theory,this chapter expounds the inevitable demand of government intervention in the field of energy and environment,and discusses the intervention methods,fiscal measures and intergovernmental functions adopted by the government to achieve the purpose of energy conservation and environmental protection,so as to highlight the core position of fiscal expenditure on energy conservation and environmental protection in environmental fiscal policies.Furthermore,the paper analyzes the connotation of the expenditure and its positive role in providing financial guarantee,optimizing resource allocation,guiding environmentfriendly behavior,and building ecological civilization,then explains its mechanism to promote environmental improvement,explores its impact channel on people's livelihood under the macro vision of ecological civilization construction in the new era,providing theoretical basis for the following study.Chapter 3 is the analysis of the development situation and problems of fiscal expenditure on energy conservation and environmental protection.By explaining the development process of China's energy conservation and environmental protection awareness from superficial to profound,policies and laws from scattered to sound,governance institutions from rough to systematic,and fiscal system from fragmentation to standardization,this paper clarifies the necessity of the development and improvement of fiscal expenditure on energy conservation and environmental protection.Then the expenditure from 2007 to 2017 are analyzed from the perspective of scale,structure,provincial and regional differences.It is found that the expenditure presents the characteristics of expanding scale,complementary functions of central and local governments,and significant role of local governments.During the analysis,the paper further points out the existing problems of the expenditure,such as limited expenditure scale,large regional differences,insufficient stability in growth rate,structure and budget completion,non-detailed division of power and responsibility,and weak capital supervision.These problems not only impede government's energy conservation and environmental protection work,affect the equalization process of energy conservation and environmental protection public services,but also provide a hotbed for the misuse of funds,seriously reduce the efficiency of the fiscal funds.Chapter 4 analyzes the effects of fiscal expenditure on energy conservation and environmental protection.Based on the core connotation of ecological civilization construction in the new era,this paper examines the impact of the expenditure on environment by constructing the provincial panel data model of China from 2007 to 2017,and finds that fiscal expenditure on energy conservation and environmental protection does indeed reduce pollution emissions,but the degree of restraint remains to be improved.What's more,in view of the requirement that"environmental protection and governance should focus on solving prominent environmental problems that harm people's health",the chapter establishes links among "expenditure-environment-health" by means of the mediation effect model to verify the transmission path of the three aspects.The result shows that fiscal expenditure on energy conservation and environmental protection can reduce PM2.5 concentration and improve air quality,which has a positive impact on national health.According to the empirical results,this chapter draws inspirations such as optimizing the structure of the expenditure,attaching importance to the fiscal pressure of local governments and so on.Chapter 5 focuses on the efficiency of fiscal expenditure on energy conservation and environmental protection.Given the positive effects of the expenditure,this paper comprehensively calculates the efficiency of the government's financial funds for energy conservation and environmental protection,in order to bring its functions into full play.Due to the shortcomings of traditional DEA,this chapter uses the four-stage DEA model to calculate the comprehensive technical efficiency,pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency of the expenditure in 30 provinces in mainland China(excluding Tibet),excluding the impact of exogenous environmental variables.On this basis,Bootstrap-DEA method is adopted further to correct the biases of the above results.After eliminating the influence of exogenous environmental variables and random biases,the results show that the provincial fiscal expenditure efficiency of energy conservation and environmental protection in China is generally low.The comprehensive technical efficiency and pure technical efficiency of 30 provinces have never reached the effective level,and the efficiency growth are not significant.The gaps of the expenditure efficiency among different provinces and regions are also large.In 2017,the province with the highest comprehensive technical efficiency was 9 times of the lowest.These not only require local governments to strengthen the management and application of energy conservation and environmental protection fiscal funds,but also require the central government to improve the coordination capacity of energy conservation and environmental protection fiscal funds.Chapter 6 is the optimization of fiscal expenditure on energy conservation and environmental protection.According to the problems raised above,this chapter proposes to perfect the expenditure from five aspects,which include to increase fiscal investment in energy conservation and environmental protection steadily,improve the expenditure guarantee system,clarify the division of rights and responsibilities,balance regional differences,and enhance expenditure efficiency.Compared with the existing research on energy conservation and environmental protection fiscal expenditure,this paper makes the following tentative exploration.Firstly,taking the core connotation of ecological civilization construction in the new era as the starting point,this paper focuses on the environmental and health aspects in the research of the expenditure effects.This is different from the existing literature which pays more attention to the economic effect of the expenditure,and helps to demonstrate the positive role of the expenditure in improving the environment and benefiting people's livelihood.Secondly,in the study of health effect,the much-concerned PM2.5 is selected as the mediating variable to measure the degree of air pollution,which is more time-sensitive than the commonly used air pollution indicators such as industrial waste gas emission,sulfur dioxide emission and PM 10.In the calculation of expenditure efficiency,the output index is divided into three aspects:pollution control,energy conservation and ecological repair,which can reflect the functions of the expenditure more comprehensively than the pollutant emission indicators adopted in most literatures.Thirdly,given the usually-adopted traditional DEA method cannot avoid the influence of exogenous environmental variables and random biases on real efficiency,this paper selects four-stage DEA to calculate the provincial expenditure efficiency,excluding the interference of exogenous environmental variables such as industrial structure,population quality and economic development by Tobit regression of input relaxation modulus.On this basis,the Bootstrap-DEA method is used to correct the biases caused by random impact in efficiency evaluation.To some extent,these methods make up the deficiency of traditional DEA.Fourthly,based on the in-depth impact of the division of powers and responsibilities among governments on the fiscal funds and related work,this paper explores the improvement of the vertical powers of intergovernmental energy conservation and environmental protection according to the principles of spillover,information complexity and incentive compatibility.It is an attempt to enrich the division of intergovernmental rights and responsibilities for energy conservation and environmental protection,making the allocation of energy conservation and environmental protection fiscal funds more reasonable."There is no substitute for the ecological environment." As the necessary fiscal guarantee for national ecological environment governance,fiscal expenditure on energy conservation and environmental protection is supposed to play an active role in guiding public behavior and attracting social investment on the basis of optimizing structure and improving efficiency,so as to promote the development of China's energy conservation and environmental protection in a deeper and farther direction.