Can The Title Of "National Model" Really Curb Urban Environmental Pollution?

Since the reform and opening up more than 40 years ago,China’s economy and urbanization have been developing rapidly,and the environmental problems hidden under the once extensive development mode have been exposed.Pollution incidents occur frequently,environmental quality continues to deteriorate the living environment of urban residents,threatening physical and mental health,and beginning to restrict economic development.In order to better control urban environmental pollution,the state environmental protection bureau proposed to create a group of rapid economic development,clean and beautiful environment,ecological virtuous cycle of model cities,in order to play an exemplary role in promoting the regional economy and the environment of the benign balance.Model creation activities have been carried out vigorously for many years,and a number of environmental model cities have been formed.However,the Taihu blue-green algae event has exposed the shortcomings of the early model creation activities:the lack of mature management mechanism for model cities has led to the degradation of environmental quality and even retaliated rebound after model evaluation.Therefore,the state ministry of environmental protection,on the basis of drawing lessons from the experience of creating a national model city for environmental protection,In 2011,"the national environmental protection model city creation and management measures "were issued and implemented,which shifted the focus of work to the management of model cities.This method makes a very detailed description of the preliminary establishment,mid-term review and follow-up supervision of the establishment of national environmental protection model cities,which marks the maturity of the establishment and management of model cities in China.With the implementation of the new model system in 2011,how does its policy effect?Has it significantly reduced environmental pollution in cities?This paper takes the promulgation and implementation of the policy as the natural experiment,and use the difference-in-difference model to test the net effect of the policy,that is,to what extent the implementation of the policy inhibits the urban environmental pollution.and to subdivide the non-model city in a city that is creating a national environmental model city and a city that is’t creating a national environmental model non-model city,multi-level to explore the effect of the policy of the measures implemented.The study found that(1)the implementation of the policy significantly inhibited the environmental pollution of model cities and creating-model cities,and this conclusion was still valid in a series of robustness tests.(2)the heterogeneity test found that different regions and cities with different administrative authorities had different reactions to the policy,and the policy effect was more obvious in the model cities in the central region and creating-model cities in the western region and the minority areas.(3)based on the perspective of official turnover,the author further studied the impact of policy discontinuity on the urban environment,and found that the environmental protection work of model cities was still sustainable when they were impacted by policy discontinuity,that is,environmental pollution of model cities would not be aggravated by the replacement of officials,but non-model and non-creating-model cities would be aggravated in the impact of policy discontinuity,which supported the view of this paper.(4)in the title of "the mold"influence mechanism analysis,this paper found that the low financial dependence,high level of opening to the outside world and low environmental regulation in the city,the implementation of this method has a more obvious inhibitory effect on urban environmental pollution,no matter in the model city group or the creating-model city group.The lower the proportion of tertiary industry in model cities,the greater the room for environmental improvement and the more obvious the effect of policy implementation.The effect of policy implementation was greater in the cities with a high proportion of tertiary industry.Compared with the existing research,innovation of this paper is mainly in three aspects:firstly,different from previous studies which only considered the similarities and differences between model and non-model cities,this paper analyzed the changes of environmental pollution in model cities in two different periods before and after 2011.Secondly,taking into account the particularity of creating-model cities,this paper explores the restraining effect of the implementation of the policy on urban environmental pollution from the two levels of model cities and creating-model cities,expands the target of the policy,and more comprehensively provides empirical basis and theoretical guidance for the implementation effect of the policy.Thirdly,different from the existing literature,this paper further analyzes the impact of the new model policy on the environmental pollution of model cities from the perspective of policy discontinuity caused by the replacement of officials,which supports the viewpoint of this paper.The research of this paper will be helpful to explore the management mechanism of the newly created national environmental protection model city policy on model city and its impact on the environmental protection of different types of cities.It can not only provide theoretical and empirical basis for further improving the model city creation and management method,but also provide empirical basis for the implementation of the policy effect of this method.