| In the past 40 years of reform and opening up,the rapid development of Chinese economy has attracted worldwide attention.However,the extensive economic development mode has caused China to pay a huge environmental cost.The coexistence of rapid economic development and environmental damage is closely related to Chinese unique government governance structure of “political centralization and economic decentralization”.Under the incentive mechanism of “Chinese-style decentralization”,local government officials,under the political incentive of promotion and the economic incentive of local fiscal and taxation growth,compete to lower factor prices,relax local environmental regulations,and compete for regional economic growth,causing serious environmental damage.In order to solve the increasingly serious environmental problems,in 2007,the central government officially incorporated environmental protection indicators into the official assessment system.So,in the context of the central government's environmental preferences,is local government environmental regulation compatible with both political incentives and economic incentives under fiscal decentralization?The main part of this paper conducts an empirical study on the data of 333 prefecture-level cities in China from 1996 to 2013,and takes 2007 as a critical year to respectively investigate the changes of local governments' governance behavior under the central incentive mechanism around 2007.The study found that political incentives as the first incentive for officials,the adjustment of the central government's development goals leads to the adjustment of officials' governance behavior based on political incentives.At the same time,the governance behavior based on environmental protection is not conducive to the financial incentives of officials,and there is a contradiction between political incentives and economic incentives.In terms of political incentives,after 2007,compared with before 2007,the cleanliness of industrial structure has significantly increased the positive contribution to the promotion of officials.The environmental performance appraisal system has promoted the green development of regions.Under the political incentive of promotion,local governments compete for the green development of regions.Further research found that party committee officials have greater responsibility for the regional environmental development,reflecting the political uniqueness of Chinese “the CCP leads everything.”In terms of economic incentives,in the research stage,after 2007,the fiscal revenue growth of local governments is more dependent on industrial industries at the margin.Empirical studies have verified that in order to achieve the green development of the region,the local government regulation leads to the decline in economic growth rate,and the marginal loss of economic growth with industry as the main body is increasing in statistics,indicating that the adjustment of industrial structure in China has not stimulated the inherent vitality of economic growth on the whole.The empirical research results also show that there are regional differences in the level of industrial structure in China,and the level of green development in different regions is quite different.The industrial structure in the eastern region has gradually developed towards clean and green development.On the whole,the green development of local governments not only needs to deepen the reform of environmental management system and refine the regional environmental protection indicator system,more importantly,it also needs to accelerate the optimization and adjustment of industrial structure through technological upgrading.Ultimately,making the sustainable development of the environment becomes the productive force,and relying on the join forces of the government,the public and the society to implement the concept of green development. |
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