Environmental And Economic Effects Of Environmental Target Responsibility System

Environmental issues have always been an important issue of concern to the government and the public,and because environmental protection itself has a strong externality,the government plays a role in it,especially today when the construction of ecological civilization has become part of China’s six major governance systems.How to effectively ensure that the ecological environment is not destroyed has become an important issue that the Chinese government urgently needs to solve.Among the two main methods for solving environmental problems,namely,command and control policy and market based policy,China adopts more command and control environmental policie.In the case of an environmental policy,the target responsibility system is usually adopted for management and supervision.The target responsibility system refers to the decomposition and refinement of the general administrative objectives established by the superior party and government organizations according to primary and secondary,forming a set of objectives and index system,which can be used as the basis for "management"(such as evaluation,reward and punishment,etc.)of organizations at all levels,and the "letter of responsibility/letter" in written form is signed at all levels between the superior and subordinate party and government departments(Wang Hansheng and Wang Yige,2009).In terms of environmental issues,it means that the superior government stipulates specific numerical indicators on the total emission reduction and environmental quality index to the subordinate government.If the goal is achieved,the local government will be given preferential policies in project approval.If the goal is not achieved,it will be given a certain punishment.The implementation of target responsibility system in China has a long history,which can be traced back to the period of planned economy.Today,the coverage of goals has also included all aspects of economy and society,forming a multi-objective goal system.Among many goals,economic goal has always been one of the most important goals.However,there is a certain contradictory relationship between economic growth and environmental protection.When too much emphasis is placed on economic growth,the local environmental governance will decline;When environmental regulation is strengthened,local economic growth will also be negatively affected in the short term.Today,when environmental problems are paid more and more attention,it is of great significance to explore how the local government will balance the relationship between goals of economy and environment.Since then,scholars have mainly explored the impact of environmental regulation from the perspective of environmental governance and economic development.However,local governments are not faced with a single environmental goal.They also have the task of promoting local economic growth.Under the dual pressure of economy and environment,local governments will adopt a series of measures to ensure the balance between the two,so as to achieve environmental objectives on the one hand and ensure economic growth on the other.This trade-off will eventually be reflected in local environmental governance and economic growth.Therefore,this paper hopes to investigate the environmental and economic effects of the environmental target responsibility system from the perspective of the balance between environmental protection and economic development of local governments.Around this theme,this paper answers the following series of questions.The purpose of the implementation of the environmental objective responsibility system is to improve the environment.Does the environmental objective responsibility system bring about the decline of pollution emissions?The core of the environmental objective responsibility system is to include the completion of environmental objectives into the promotion assessment of local officials.Will there be differences in pollution reduction in different regions?In addition,in terms of pollution emission reduction methods,different emission reduction methods have different effects.For example,direct production reduction will have a serious negative impact on enterprises,while the negative impact of installing pollution removal facilities is relatively small.Then,under the dual pressure of economic growth and environmental protection,what are the differences in pollution emission reduction methods among enterprises in different regions?From the perspective of economic development,strict environmental regulation will have a certain negative impact on the local economy.Will these negative effects be reflected in the formulation of the government’s economic objectives?For areas with higher environmental objectives,will the local government reduce the local economic growth target in order to achieve the balance between economic growth and environmental protection?What measures will be taken to promote economic growth in areas whose economies are negatively affected by environmental objectives?While the "economic quantity" is negatively affected,will the "economic quality" of high environmental target areas be improved?Will the power industry,which is most affected by environmental regulation,achieve clean transformation?Will the energy consumption technology of the power industry be improved?Specifically,the following work is carried out in this paper.Firstly,this paper combs the historical process of China’s environmental target responsibility system,and analyzes the characteristics of China’s pollution reduction targets.In the part of combing the historical process,this paper investigates the implementation process of China’s target system and the implementation process of environmental target responsibility system.In the part of the implementation process of environmental target responsibility system,this paper combs it from the perspectives of legal documents and policy documents.In the part of summarizing the target characteristics,this paper describes and analyzes the pollutant emission reduction targets allocated by the central government to provinces and cities under the jurisdiction of provinces during the eleventh five year plan,the Twelfth Five Year Plan and the thirteenth five year plan.The results show that with the maturity of the responsibility system of environmental objectives,there are more and more differences in the environmental objectives assigned to each province;At the same time,the pollutant implementation scope of environmental target responsibility system is becoming wider and wider.From a spatial perspective,the emission reduction requirements of pollutants in the eastern region are higher than those in the central and western regions,which may be due to the relatively high degree of economic development and pollution in the eastern region.In view of this,this paper fits the pollution emission reduction targets of each city with the local economic aggregate and pollution degree,and finds that there is a correlation between them.Secondly,by exploring the impact of the environmental target responsibility system on enterprise emission reduction during the Eleventh Five Year Plan period,it is found that the environmental target responsibility system plays a role in promoting pollution emission reduction,resulting in a significant decline in enterprise pollutant emissions in high target areas compared with low target areas.The reduction of enterprise pollution emission is realized by improving the pollutant removal rate and reducing production.The competition of local governments in performance evaluation strengthens the emission reduction effect of environmental target responsibility system,and further reduces the pollution emission of enterprises in high environmental target areas.In the way of emission reduction,the inter regional performance evaluation competition promotes the improvement of pollutant removal rate of enterprises in high environmental target areas.However,due to the strict performance evaluation of local governments in terms of economic growth targets,the performance evaluation competition weakens the policy effect of polluting enterprises in high environmental target areas to reduce production.Thirdly,from the perspective of government economic target setting,this paper examines the impact of environmental target responsibility system on local "economic quantity".The results show that due to the contradiction between economic growth and environmental governance in the short term,the implementation of environmental target responsibility system reduces the local economic growth target and fiscal revenue growth target in high environmental target areas,so as to ensure that the economic target and environmental target can be completed smoothly.For the growth target of fixed asset investment,because the local government has great control over fixed asset investment and fixed asset investment can promote the growth of local economy and fiscal revenue,the growth target of local fixed asset investment will not be lowered in high environmental target areas.When we control the provincial economic objectives in the empirical model to investigate how environmental objectives affect the independent adjustment of local government objectives,the above conclusion is still valid.In the extension analysis,this paper finds that the environmental target responsibility system has a significant impact on the growth rate of various economic indicators,and various economic targets also have a positive impact on the growth rate of economic indicators.Finally,the term of office of local officials does not play a regulatory role in the impact of the environmental target responsibility system on economic targets.Finally,from the perspective of local energy transformation,this paper examines whether the environmental target responsibility system improves the local "economic quality".The results show that local environmental regulation helps to promote local energy transformation,which is reflected in the reduction of power generation,installed capacity and power generation working hours of coal-fired power plants in high environmental target areas,while the installed capacity of clean power plants in these areas increases,so as to realize the optimization of local energy structure;At the same time,the energy consumption technology of coal-fired power plants in high environmental target areas has also been improved,which is specifically reflected in the significant reduction of standard coal consumption and actual coal consumption of power generation and power supply of coal-fired power plants,so as to realize the transformation and upgrading of energy technology.In the extension analysis,it is found that the self owned power plant is less affected by the environmental objective responsibility system because it is less regulated by the government;In addition,the implementation of environmental objective responsibility system has promoted the elimination of coal-fired power plants and reduced the entry of coal-fired power plants;Finally,the environmental target responsibility system reduces the power consumption in high environmental target areas,and this reduction is more reflected in industrial power consumption.In terms of methodology,this article mainly uses a combination of theory and empirical research methods,as far as possible to achieve theoretical guidance,empirical research as verification.In terms of theoretical analysis,this article examines the response of local government behavior under the multi-objective system through text logic and diagrams.In terms of empirical methods,this article mainly uses Fixed Effects Model,Difference in Difference model and so on.As for the various estimation deviations that may appear in the empirical results,this article also uses parallel trend testing,control omission policies,and replacement of individual clusters for robustness estimation.The research in this article is of great significance for exploring China’s environmental target responsibility and target responsibility system.On this basis,this article has formed certain research recommendations,which provide the possibility to further optimize China’s environmental target responsibility system.The research in this article shows that,on the one hand,the environmental goal responsibility system has played a role in protecting the environment and contributed to the improvement of China’s environmental quality.On the other hand,it may also bring some negative effects due to the strong pursuit of goals by local governments.On this basis,this article recommends the use of a combination of command and control and market based environmental policies to avoid the drawbacks of command and control policies,and strengthen important monitoring to ensure that local governments faithfully complete emission reduction tasks.In addition,with regard to the establishment of a target assessment system,the possible responses of local governments should be fully considered to promote beneficial competition,avoid harmful competition,establish a differentiated target system,and ensure a balanced multi-target.Finally,in terms of goal setting,the local government’s goal setting needs to ensure a balance between the two aspects.On the one hand,it needs to ensure the balance of its own multi-objective system.On the other hand,it needs to ensure that the distribution of regional goals is balanced.This requires The higher-level government needs to fully communicate with the various departments and areas under its jurisdiction in the distribution goal,and fully listen to the opinions and suggestions of experts.