Influences Of Native Local Officials On Regional Economic Development Paths

What is the impact of native local officials on the local resources and environment? Compared with the formal regulations as of "political centralization and economic decentralization",the issue of environmental effects,of great importance and official individualism with strong Chinese characteristics,has been neglected.From the perspective of informal regulation,this paper,based on the practical study of the influence of local officials on the regional high-energy consumption industries,discusses the influence of local officials on regional economic and environmental development.Unlike traditional intuitions,local officials do not fulfill the promise of "take the office once,and make a green hometown."Based on the quasi-natural experiment of official replacement,this paper finds that,consistent with the previous studies,the replacement of officials has short-term promotion effect on the regional economy because it can stimulate the secondary industry temporarily,but the long-term effect is negative.In this paper we find that compared to fixed-sourced and foreign-sourced replacement of officials and Relative officials,localized official replacement will significantly enhance the proportion of high energy consuming industries,but there is 1-2 years of lagging.The Chinese government made major changes to its environmental regulations in around 2007.Economic growth was our orientation beforehand,after that,the share of environmental regulations among local officials witnessed significant increase.Based on the evolution of this formal regulation,this paper validates the stability of the influence of local officials on the development of high energy consumption industries.And we confirm that the evolution of formal environmental regulation has significantly changed the preference of officials from fixed source or foreign source on high energy consuming industries,with the correlation of the former drops from positive to not significant,and the later come from not significant to negative.Yet for localized officials focused by this paper,their regression coefficient on high energy consuming industries are both positive before and after the regulation change.In fact,the figure even saw a great increase,featuring stability beyond the formal regulation.To find out the gap between local official's environmental behaviors and our intuitions,we introduce market-oriented index to study its performance in different levels of marketization.It is found that the higher the marketization index is for a region,the stronger the promotion effect is for high energy consuming industries.This result shows that the conflict between the intuition and the actual observation of the behaviors of local officials may be the result of increased population mobility,or the conflicts between the collapsed old "acquaintance society" with the new legal system and un fully developed rules of the credit society.The conclusion of this paper is robust and does not change due to changes in the definition of native officials.And the conclusion of this paper helps to promote the research of informal regulation theory in regulation theory and its application in environmental regulation.