Research On The Choice Of Local Government's Enviromental Strategy And Effects Assessment In A Decentralized Framwork

Environmental decentralization is an important institutional arrangement of public governance.As the research field of government economics and public fiscal,the target of decentralization is to realize effective allocationof environmental public goods supply inside the government.Since the 80's Reagan era when fiscal decentralization reform started,a series of research about environmental federalism surged.There are so many factors that influence the efficiency of environment public governance,not only depend on the national fiscal system,economic development level and energy consumption structure,but also depend on the environmental governance mode which the central government choosen.Generally most of countries adopted the environment of decentralized system,in which the central government is responsible for the unified environmental policy and environmental standards,the local government is charge for the implementation of the environmental regulation,environmental protection responsibility is allocated by the cooperation with central and local governments.The focus of this dissertation is to understand the strategies of central and local government under the decentralized regimes,and we also explore the measurement of decentralization degree in order for the effects assessment.Based on the environmental federalism theory,there are two critical issues in this thesis: one is that which tieris need to set the environmental policy,especially the environmental standards.The other is whether environment decentralized governance can generate an effective regulation.And also the decentralized governance structure logically set based on the geographic heterogeneity and the transborder spillover problem.We also need some empirical research about the decentralized governance efficiency and the existence of “race to the bottom” by local government under the decentralized framework.Fist we give a review about the environmental decentralization theory and then introduced three models about the welfare differences by comparing the pure decentralization,uniform federal policy and central-local cooperative federalism,after that we establishthe regional environmental standards strategy evolution game model,discuss the the long-term evolution strategy equilibrium conditionsby local governments in China.China's environmental policy is characterized by standard centralized and implement decentralized.Environmental decentralization will increase the RTB strategy behavior from local government without the strict environment assessment from central government.However setting standard centralized will induce the heterogeneous efficiency loss.The local government always keep the bottom line in standard setting while upgrade it dependently in current environmental management system.Most of the regions have few incentives to increase their standard and also put themselves into a "prisoner's dilemma" when used the national minimum standards,and therefore it is difficult to estimate the efficiency loss.Someone fears that the local states will adopt more lax policies in environmental regulation.Using the investment data of projects meeting “environmental assessment” and “three simultaneity” requirements,we examine the behavior of an environmental RTB by local government between2003-2012.Results indicate that the dirty investment growth depends on two factors: the restriction of the government fiscal deficit and geography drive for corporate endogenous pollution emission requirements.Developed areas are still a major source of pollution with higher investment but the growth speed falling.Less developed areas with rapid growth of fiscal deficits exist the phenomenon of environmental “race to the bottom”,however no advantage in competing for large investment projects.The “three simultaneity” investment has a significantpositive effect on the local fiscal deficit when controlled geography variable.In the three major areas,there is an obvious motive for mobile capital in the Bohai rim area where the capacity of environmental self-purification is weakest.This paper uses the method of Shannon-Spearman to premeasure the level of environmental decentralization of China on the basis of building combined index system.Then we examine the correlation between the environmental decentralization and the dirty investment,also with the environmental pollution by using the Chinese Environmental Decentralization Index.We find an inverted U-shaped relation between the environmental decentralization and the dirty investment.With the increasing environmental decentralization,the effects to pollution changed from negative to positive.The cross coefficient of environmental decentralization and polluting investment was also significantly positive,it reveals the phenomenon of environmental “race to the bottom” by local government under the decentralized regimes.We investigate how the environmentaldecentralization regimesaffect the policy outcomes in the worldwide.In particular,does the level ofenvironmental centralization affect the environmental quality? We use a cross section of up to78 countries and a propensity score estimation approach.We find that environmental centralization,measured by the level of government hierarchical ties,decreases the stringency of environmental policies set under the decentralized regimes.We also find an inverted U-shaped relation between the fiscal decentralization and environmental quality.The cross coefficient of environmental decentralization and fiscal decentralization has a negative effect with environmental quality,which indicates that environmental decentralization will lower the incentive of environmental protection by local governments with insufficient fiscal support.This paper puts forward the corresponding countermeasures about the public management in order to improve the efficiency of the decentralized environment governance and implement in adifferentiatedenvironmental policy.