Research On The Problem Of Fiscal Spending On Energy Conservation And Environmental Protection

Since the beginning of the opening up, China's economy has achieved rapid development. GDP increased from 3650.2 billion yuan to 636462.7 billion yuan from 1978 to 2014,the average annual GDP is 141950.8 billion yuan. But the growth mode which only focused on economic development also brought a variety of ecological damage problems, such as environmental pollution, resource shortages, land desertification, forest decrease, species extinction, etc. If we continue to pursue economic growth and ignore ecological environment, environmental degradation will in turn affect our economic development, people's health and social stability.With the intensifying of environmental pollution and energy shortages, ecological control demand grows fast.Governments do various supports, such as financial policies and subsidy, and the social from all walks of life have made corresponding efforts in financial and material resources.Especially since expenditure on energy conservation and environmental protection was classified as the class level independently, our work has great advances:one is the change of government officials'"only GDP theory", which is that environmental protection visualization prompts economic development based on environment and resource bearing capacity and emphasizing quality rather than economic scale and speed; the second is that governments strengthen attention on environment, supervision and enforcement is more transparent, and public awareness also soars rapidly.Although we obtained certain results,there are still many problems.For example,although expenditure has increased,its level is still low.According to statistics,environmental protection investment share of GDP,the period of the ninth five-year plan was about 0.90%,the period of the tenth five-year plan was about 1.18%, the period of the eleventh five-year plan was about 1.53%.While the share of GDP rose to 1%-1.5%,this was just the basic level to control pollution, which was far from developed countries', and the highest proportion of 1.86% in 2010 was only equivalent to Russia's level in 2000. In addition to investment insufficient, the problems,such as imperfect fiscal policies of environmental protection, low funds efficiency and ambiguous environmental responsibility,still exist.Environmental resources is one public goods with significant externality and little benefit.Because of interests pursuit, enterprises are not willing to enter to environmental protection field.But environment is the basic carrier of human, economic and social development, and its market failure must have negative impact on the whole society. So governments have an irreplaceable responsibility to its protection.Expenditure on energy conservation and environmental protection,as one of the important sources of funds for the environmental protection investment in China, plays an integrated,controlled and guided role in environmental protection. So, environmental protection is the important and unavoidable task of the Chinese government.Facing present's grim situation of ecological environment,governments must exert the principal role of environmental governance on the premise of fully considering all kinds of problems and causes, and really solve environmental problems through the strict law enforcement and the whole supervision process.Based on the basic theory of public finance, ecological environment and economics, taking expenditure on energy conservation and environmental protection as analysis object and using various analysis methods,this paper study many relevant aspects.Through analyzing its current situation,problems and causes,and foreign experiences such as the foreign legal system of environmental protection, preferential policy, responsibility division, the system of transfer payments, and capital use,this paper proposes some advises to strengthen pollution control, act on energy conservation and improve environmental quality.This paper's contents are as follows:The first part is the introduction.The part mainly analyzes the research background and significance, domestic and foreign literature reviews, research contents and methods, innovation points and deficiencies.The second part is the theoretical basis of fiscal spending on energy conservation and environmental protection.Firstly,this part introduces basic definition of fiscal spending on energy conservation and environmental protection:the content,the measure index system of expenditure scale and structure, and the necessity;Secondly,this section elaborates the related theories in four aspects:public goods theory, externality theory, sustainable development theory,and asymmetric information theory.The third part is the situation analysis of fiscal spending on energy conservation and environmental protection.First section states the evolution course of policies of expenditure on energy conservation and environmental protection according to China's five-year plan and characteristics of fiscal environmental policies; Second section carries out a large amount of quantitative analysis of expenditure on energy conservation and environmental protection using statistics and charts.Scale analysis includes static index and dynamic index analysis,and structure analysis includes comparative analysis of central government and local governments,regional different analysis of provinces and the internal structure analysis;Based on the data analysis,the final section finds four problems:low expenditure scale,unclear central and local governments'responsibility division,obvious regional differences, and weak balanced internal structure.The fourth part is the causes analysis based on problems of fiscal spending on energy conservation and environmental protection.Including four aspects:lack of stable expenditure safeguard mechanism,unclear environmental responsibility division, still-incomplete environmental transfer payment system,and irrational use mechanism of funds.The fifth part is typical countries'(the United States, Australia,Canada,and Great Britain) experiences.This section includes to consummate safeguard mechanism of environmental protection,to clarify government environmental responsibility division, to improve sound transfer payment system and to construct reasonable use mechanism of environmental protection funds.The sixth part is the countermeasures and suggestions of fiscal spending on energy conservation and environmental protection.Based on the above comprehensive analysis, some proposals are put forward:to establish a stable expenditure safeguard mechanism, to clear government expenditure responsibility,to improve the transfer payment system,and to raise the funds'performance.