The Mechanism And Effect Of Government And Enterprise Environmental Joint Governance

China's rapid economic development is at the cost of environmental pollution.Environmental pollution problems have seriously threatened public health and safety,and restricted the sustainable development of China's economy and society,which are a blight on people's quality of life and a trouble that weights on their hearts.Faced with these problems,we must tackle both symptoms and root causes and take tough steps.In recent years,although China's central government and the State Council have attached great importance to environmental issues,and put forward many initiatives from the top-level design of policies and regulations to deal with environmental problems,the regional environmental pollution situation is still grim.Therefore,how to design effective policies and promote the construction of environmental governance system,which is the key to protect natural resources and ecological environment and achieve high-quality economic development.However,both local governments and enterprises lack the motivation to actively fulfill their environmental responsibilities in the practice of environmental governance in China.Industrial activities of enterprises are the primary factor leading to environmental deterioration.As the largest pollutant emission body in China,enterprises not only accumulate economic benefits for the market,but also bring heavy environmental costs to the society.If enterprises are both expected to create profits and accumulate wealth for the society by carrying out industrial activities of a given scale,and to reduce the adverse impact of industrial activities on the environment,an ideal path is that enterprises voluntarily increase investment in environmental protection,purchase or transform environmental protection facilities,speed up technological upgrading and production process optimization,and carry out industrial activities in a more environmentally friendly way,so as to achieve the win-win goal of enterprise profit and environmental governance.However,the investment in environmental protection involves the trade-off between future uncertain income and current determined profit,as well as the comparison between economic benefits and social benefits in reality.In the absence of external intervention,it is difficult for rational enterprises to take the initiative to use the limited financial resources for environmental protection investment with low short-term economic benefits and great uncertainty in the future.In a decentralized system,local governments,as the main body of environmental governance,should have effectively intervened in the environmental investment decisions of polluting enterprises and guided them to create green profits.However,under the promotion system that takes GDP as the focus of assessment,local governments lack sufficient motivation for environmental governance.In order to strengthen environmental protection consciousness of local officials and local government responsibility of governing enterprise,the CPC Central Committee and the State Council have successively introduced a series of policies,rules and regulations from the various levels of governing the Party,the country and the officials since 2005.These regulations closely link environmental governance with the official career of local officials,gradually increase the weight of environmental governance performance in the assessment,appointment,reward and punishment of cadres,implement the one-vote veto on environmental protection,and promote the formation of an environmental governance system jointly governed by the government,enterprises and the public.In the past 20 years,the National People's Congress and the central government have issued more than 500 systems and regulations related to environmental issues in the form of orders of the National Presidency,the State Council,the Ministry of Environmental Protection(SEPA),relevant ministries and commissions.The determination of the central government to fight pollution is not weak,and the strength is not weak.However,the local government's environmental supervision of polluting enterprises has not achieved the desired effect,which is out of proportion to the central government's efforts to control pollution.It can be seen that clarifying the environmental governance responsibilities of the government and enterprises,and promoting the effective implementation of environmental governance responsibilities by all social entities are the primary premise of environmental policy-making,and also an important topic of common concern in the current theoretical and practical circles.From the overall perspective of institutional change,the existing researches focus more on the governance effect of traditional regional environmental governance policies,such as the “River Manager” system and the environmental court.However,the effectiveness of these policies not only highly depend on the willingness and motivation of local governments,but also need to be guaranteed by regional institutions and policies.Therefore,it may be difficult to play a significant role in a short time.In addition,from the overall dimension of the researches,the existing researches still remain to interpret corporate environmental responsibility and government environmental responsibility from a single dimension,but don't discuss the performance of corporate and government environmental responsibility from the perspective of the full cycle and the whole process of environmental responsibility.For example,existing studies may focus on a single aspect,such as the disclosure of environmental information by the government or enterprises,government financial investment in environmental protection or enterprise investment in environmental protection,regional pollution control or enterprise pollution discharge.To study the environmental responsibility of the enterprise or government from the perspective of single environmental governance behavior,it is impossible to comprehensively identify the environmental responsibility of the government and enterprise,and it is even more difficult to comprehensively and quantitatively evaluate the performance of the environmental responsibility of the government and enterprise in practice.For this,this paper analyzes the Central Environmental Protection Inspection(CEPI),which is the most representative vertical environmental system in the new era,comprehensively evaluates the governance effect of the policy from the dimensions of environmental governance process and environmental governance consequences,and analyzes the internal mechanism of the effect from the perspective of "macro to micro".Under the decentralized system,the Central Environmental Protection Inspection as a "supervision" system,not only clarifies the governance responsibility of local governments,strengthens the environmental governance motivation of local governments,but also helps local governments to clarify the important ideas of regional environmental governance.That is,not only to invest local government's own fiscal funds for environmental governance,but also to promote the environmental governance of pollution control subjects within their jurisdiction.This system provides an appropriate research scenario for our paper to observe the interaction between central government and local government,as well as between local government and polluting enterprises.Specifically,using the multi-disciplinary knowledge of environmental economics,political economics,accounting and finance through the combination of empirical research and normative research,this paper mainly discusses the following three issues: 1)Whether CEPI stimulates local government's environmental governance motivation,so as to promote the local government to use its own fiscal funds for environmental protection government? 2)Facing the pressure of "supervision" from CEPI,how can the local governments take incentive and restraint measures to promote the environmental governance of polluting enterprises in its jurisdiction? 3)Has CEPI system effectively improved the regional environmental quality? Is this improvement temporary or continuous? How much economic loss and welfare effect has it brought?The main findings are as follows:Firstly,CEPI has significantly stimulated the motivation of local governments in environmental governance,enhanced their attention to environmental issues,and then increased the level of local fiscal investment in environmental protection.This paper also further analyzes the influence of regional fiscal situation,fiscal decentralization degree and officials promotion expectation on the above effects,and finds that the promotion effect of CEPI on the local fiscal investment in environmental protection is more significant in the groups with abundant local fiscal resources,lower degree of decentralization,and the promotion expectation of the municipal officials.Secondly,faced with the huge and continuous pressure of "supervision" brought by CEPI,local governments have strengthened the environmental law enforcement of polluting enterprises in its jurisdiction,improved the level of environmental subsidies for enterprises,guided the polluting enterprises in its jurisdiction to increase environmental protection investment,and carried out substantial environmental governance.This paper further analyzes the different responses of different types of polluting enterprises to the pressure of local environmental governance,and the impact of promotion expectations of the municipal officials on this effect.It is found that CEPI plays a stronger role in promoting the environmental protection investment of enterprises in the regions with lower fiscal expenditure on environmental protection,the local officials with promotion expectations,the state-owned enterprises and the enterprises with high tax contribution.Thirdly,CEPI has not only effectively improved the regional air quality in the short term,but also played a continuous role in the medium and long term.Further welfare analysis shows that CEPI has slowed down the local economic growth and brought certain public health benefits.These results show that the implementation of CEPI not only causes the local government to bear huge economic losses,but also effectively improves the local public health welfare.Under the effective incentive and restraint mechanism of the central government,local governments are willing to pay a premium for the immediate and substantial reduction of environmental pollution,and ultimately achieve greater social welfare improvements in human health and mortality.The contributions of this paper are as follows:Firstly,this study enriches the research of the environmental decentralization system and local fiscal environmental protection investment and enterprise environmental protection investment to a certain extent.Previous studies may focus more on discussing the impact of the stable state of decentralization or centralization on environmental governance.However,existing studies have failed to give a definite conclusion on whether decentralization is better or centralization is better.In fact,decentralization or centralization of power is not stable and invariable.It mainly depends on the operating environment of the system and the problems that need to be solved.As far as China's environmental governance is concerned,pure decentralization or centralization may be different to alleviate the contradiction of China's government in environmental governance.Therefore,based on the background of decentralization of environmental governance in China,this paper analyzes the environmental governance effect of the vertical system represented by the CEPI after breaking the local "block" governance pattern.Specifically,local governments are the main body of the current regional environmental governance that plays a leading role in the regional environmental governance,and the heavily polluting enterprises are the important micro body of the improvement of regional environmental governance.However,at present,few studies focus on the impact of major environmental governance measures in the new era on local fiscal environmental protection investment and enterprise environmental protection investment.This paper focuses on the impact of the most representative CEPI in the new era on the environmental protection investment behavior of the key subjects of regional environmental governance(local governments and enterprises),which enriches the research on local fiscal environmental protection investment and corporate environmental protection investment.Secondly,this paper not only examines the actual effect of CEPI from the short and medium term,but also observes the specific environmental governance measures taken by local governments and polluting enterprises.Theses existing researches usually utilize environmental indicator data to test the effect of environmental protection policies.However,is the improvement of environmental indicators the result of artificial whitewashing or the effect of actual governance? Can the short-term improvement of environmental indicators in the window period represent the sustainable effectiveness of environmental policies? There is no empirical evidence to answer the above questions.Based on the advantages of accounting discipline,combined with the government and enterprise environmental protection investment and regional air quality data,this paper constructs a more comprehensive evaluation framework.Specifically,on the basis of the significant improvement of environmental indicators in the inspection window period,the changes of the proportion of days with different levels of air quality before and after the environmental protection supervision are supplemented,and the medium and long-term improvement effect of environmental protection supervision on regional environmental quality is further tested.More importantly,by observing the scale changes of local fiscal environmental protection investment and environmental protection investment of polluting enterprises before and after the central environmental protection supervision,this paper further identifies the substantive environmental governance measures taken by local governments from the perspective of government and enterprise capital investment.Thirdly,this paper focuses on the transmission mechanism of environmental governance between central government and local government,local governments and enterprises,and then reveals the logic behind the governance actions taken by local governments and polluting enterprises.Under the simple logic of "supervising enterprises",local officials lack the sufficient will to govern,which leads to the absence of government in local environmental governance.The idea of "supervision" proposed by CEPI can theoretically enhance the governance will of local officials.But in reality,can CEPI improve the governance motivation of local officials,and do local governments pay more attention to environmental protection? After the local governments attach importance to environmental protection,how can they transmit the willingness of governance to the polluting enterprises within their jurisdiction? There are few literature to test the above conduction mechanism.This paper finds that the main transmission mechanism of environmental governance decision-making between central and local governments is that CEPI promote local governments to pay attention to environmental issues.Local governments to strengthen the environmental law enforcement of polluting enterprises within its jurisdiction,and enhance environmental subsidies,are two possible governance motivation transmission paths between government and enterprises.It can be seen that local officials have governance motivation,and paying attention to environmental protection is the key to improve the regional environment quality.Fourthly,the research strategy from macroscopic to microscopic in this paper can effectively alleviate the endogenous problems in environmental policy effect evaluation literature.In recent years,adopting the research design of the influence of macro policy on the behavior of microcosmic body is an effective method to solve the endogenous problems in the research of corporate finance.CEPI is a macro environmental control measure aimed at the whole country.It is difficult for the local government and the polluters to interfere with the implementation of the policy.This research design can effectively avoid the potential reverse causality in the study of regional environmental quality caused by environmental policies.In particular,this paper also uses Cox proportional hazards model to test the randomness of district selection implemented by CEPI,which further mitigates the potential endogenous interference in the evaluation of environmental policy effect in the existing literature.