The Nature Of Environmental Governance Within Motivation And Its Implementation Mechanism

As one kind of scarce resources, environment, especially the good environment, is very important for the long-term development of a society. But because of the public-good characteristics of the environmental resources and the negative externalities resulting from the use of it, it will lead to "free-riding" behavior to use the environmental resources. In such circumstances, there usually tends to be excessive use of the environmental resources. As the main user of environmental resources, firm will often overuse the environmental resources for opportunism if without effective restraints. So it usually requires the government to conduct environmental regulation to resolve the problem of excessive use of the environmental resources and the resulting negative externality. Evidences show pollution abatement practice the government did play a major role.But in the past 10 years, more and more firms begin taking endogenous pollution abatement actions, that is, besides meeting the basic requirements for environmental management of the government, conduct further pollution abatement behavior. As is known, pollution abatement is costly. So some relevant issues have gradually become the focus that the academicians and policy makers concern about, such as why firms will take endogenous pollution abatement actions that contrary to intuition, what kinds of firms are more inclined to do this, whether endogenous pollution abatement is the supplement or the replacement of environmental regulation, and how the environmental regulation influences corporate endogenous pollution abatement, etc. So, it will play a guiding role in decision-making of the regulatory authority as well as the firms that making sense the logic base, the realization mechanism and the external constraints of corporate endogenous pollution abatement and clarifying the contradictions in intuition.The framework and chapter contents of the thesis are arranged as follows: chapter 1 is an introduction. It firstly examines the motivation of corporate pollution abatement from two perspectives of the "Just-Compliance" and "Over-Compliance" with environmental regulations. Then it presents the implication of the endogenous pollution abatement and literature review about that field. Then it followed by the theory and the practical significance of this thesis. Chapter 2 investigates the logic basis of corporate endogenous pollution abatement by using cost-benefit approach. Then it reaches the conclusion that the goal of endogenous environment protection is incentive compatible with firm's target of profit maximization. This section also analyzes which types of firms are more inclined to take endogenous pollution abatement actions. Chapter 3 examines the realization mechanism of the endogenous pollution abatement. By building a two-stage duopoly game model, this chapter analyzes how firms achieve product differentiation and thereby gain a competitive advantage through strategic pollution abatement. Chapter 4 discusses the external constraints of the endogenous pollution abatement, examines how environmental regulation influences corporate endogenous pollution abatement, and concludes that the endogenous pollution abatement is the complement, not the replacement, of environmental regulation. If there is no environmental regulations, firms will have no incentive to take endogenous pollution abatement actions. This section also comes to the conclusion that market-based instruments for environmental regulation can more inspire this behavior. Chapter 5, the last part, concludes the thesis and presents the policy implications.