A Study Of The Impact Of Government Environmental Attention On CO₂ Emissions

After the industrial revolution,the economic development of human society took off rapidly,however,this rapid economic growth is at the expense of the environment,people’s extensive exploitation of fossil resources,inevitably led to a surge in carbon dioxide emissions,global climate problems,governments have made such efforts to address the carbon problem,in the recently concluded 20 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China,the country stressed the the importance of carbon peaking and carbon neutrality.It is required to actively and steadily promote carbon peaking and carbon neutrality.Participate in global climate governance with a positive attitude.In order to study the influence of governmental behavior on carbon issues,this paper examines the influence of governmental environmental attention on local CO2 emissions from the perspective of attention.This paper takes the 2009-2017 administrative regions at all levels in China as the research sample,and uses text analysis techniques to deeply mine the local government work reports to study the impact of local government environmental attention on local carbon dioxide emissions based on measuring local government environmental attention.Firstly,this paper outlines the research background and research significance,and composes the relevant literature.Second,after summarizing the relevant theoretical foundations,the influence of government environmental attention on local carbon dioxide emissions is analyzed,and the roles played by environmental enforcement,industrial agglomeration and industrial structure are analyzed.Then,the measure of government environmental attention and its characteristics,the research design of this paper,and the related empirical analysis are described.Finally,the identification of the mechanism of government environmental attention is carried out.The innovation of this paper is to study the influencing factors of carbon emissions from the new perspective of government environmental attention.At the same time,the distance variable is innovatively chosen as an instrumental variable of government environmental attention.The straight-line distance between each city and the provincial capital city is used as the instrumental variable.The main findings are as follows:(1)Increased attention to environmental issues by local governments can curb local CO2 emissions.The result still holds after a series of robust type tests.(2)A heterogeneity analysis is conducted,and it is concluded that the effect of government environmental attention on CO2 emissions varies significantly across the East,Central and West regions and among cities at different administrative levels.(3)Further mechanism analysis reveals that government environmental attention can influence local carbon emissions through the paths of industrial agglomeration,industrial structure,and government environmental enforcement.Government environmental attention can indirectly suppress local carbon emissions through industrial agglomeration,and achieve the suppression effect on carbon emissions by improving the government’s enforcement power on environmental issues.The carbon dioxide emissions can be reduced by decreasing the share of secondary industries and thus the carbon dioxide emissions.Based on the above findings,we makes the following recommendations,the government should pay attention to the reasonable allocation of attention,and can enhance the allocation of government attention to the environment by strengthening the incentive role of environmental assessment in the performance evaluation of officials.Pay attention to the differences between regions and combine local characteristics to allocate attention reasonably.At the same time,we should also pay attention to the indirect influence of the government’s environmental attention and improve the government’s environmental enforcement to achieve better suppression effect on carbon dioxide emissions.