| During the 14th Five-Year Plan period.China’s industrialization and urbanization will enter a stage of quality improvement,structural and distributed problems are still prominent.and environmental pollution remains a major problem that can’t be avoided on China’s path to high-quality development.In recent years.the central government has been increasing its investment in environmental governance,but little effect has been achieved.This causes people to think that:why does the central government attach great importance to environmental governance but achieve little?That is,what causes the significant"ineffective regulation"?This paper argues that it is not simply the problem of insufficient investment in environmental governance,nor can it simply be attributed to the inevitable result of rapid economic growth,which is closely related to the institutional arrangement of China’s environmental regulatory system.For a long time,China has implemented the localized environmental regulation model of "combining rules and regulations,focusing on blocks and hierarchical management".In other words,the central government makes environmental regulations and local governments at all levels implement them.Local governments are responsible for the environmental quality of their jurisdictions and have a great deal of discretion in the implementation of environmental regulations.Although this localized environmental supervision model has its specific local information advantages,it also has many problems.In particular,under the influence of Chinese-style fiscal decentralization and the official promotion mechanism that takes economic growth as the evaluation standard,local governments are more motivated to sacrifice environmental protection to promote local economic growth.As a result,the supervision responsibilities of local governments and relevant departments are difficult to be implemented.Local protectionism seriously interferes with environmental enforcement,the independence of regulatory agencies is lacking,and trans-regional and trans-wtershed environmental problems are difficult to be solved,which seriously hinders the implementation of environmental regulation policies.Therefore,in order to get rid of the interference of local protectionism in regulating the control of personnel finance and property of the department and normal enforcement,and to prevent the collusion between government and enterprise,the vertical management system arises at the right moment under the force of the practical defects of the territorial management system.On September 22,2016,the general office of the CPC Central Committee and the general office of the State Council issued "Guiding opinions on the pilot reform of the vertical management system for monitoring,supervision and enforcement of environmental protection institutions below the provincial level".The gradual establishment of vertical management reform pilots below the provincial level has initiated the transformation of the environmental supervision system from territorial management to vertical management.However,the implementation effect and the impact are still unknown:On the one hand,theoretically,the change of this regulatory model will help to break the improper interference of local protection in environmental enforcement,prevent the collusion between government and enterprises,and strengthen the authority and independence of environmental enforcement;On the other hand,the vertical management system will face many implementation obstacles in the actual promotion process,such as the implementation of the supervision responsibilities of various departments and the staffing of environmental protection agencies.On the whole,the policy effect of the transformation from territorial management to vertical management supervision mode is still unable to draw a scientific conclusion from the existing literature.In fact,before the central government proposed to implement the vertical management reform of monitoring,supervision and enforcement of environmental protection institutions below the provincial level in September 2016,local governments explored the vertical management reform of environmental protection institutions from "districts/counties to prefecture level cities",which provided an empirical analysis basis for this paper to study the policy effect and action mechanism of the vertical management reform of the environmental supervision system.Although the vertical management reform of environmental protection institutions from "districts/counties to prefecture level cities"cannot be completely equated with the vertical management reform of environmental protection institutions below the province level,it can still reflect the core meaning of the vertical management reform,that is,by adjusting the subordinate relationship of institutions,straightening out the responsibility relationship between departments and blocks,and breaking the interference of local protectionism in environmental enforcement.The vertical management reform of "districts/counties to prefecture level cities" is the core part of the new round of vertical management reform of environmental protection system.The vertical management reform of environmental protection institutions below the provincial level should finally be implemented in the grass-roots district and county environmental protection institutions.At the same time,the ultimate goal of pollution reduction is also in the grass-roots micro enterprises.So.based on the exogenous policy impact of the vertical management reform of the environmental regulatory system from district/county to prefecture-level city,this paper scientifically evaluates the impact of vertical management reform of local environmental protection bureaus on pollutant emission and productivity of enterprises,and reveals the internal influence mechanism and possible emission reduction path of the vertical management reform.It provides theoretical and empirical evidence for the construction of ecological and environmental supervision system and the reform of environmental management system.The main contents and conclusions of this paper are as follows:Firstly,under the principal-agent framework of asymmetric information,this paper analyzes the impact of the change of environmental supervision system from territorial management to vertical management on the behavior bias and strategy choice of local governments and polluting enterprises,as well as the optimal emission level choice of polluting enterprises,so as to obtain the environmental governance effects under different scenarios.Then,based on the matching data of chinese industrial enterprise database and Chinese enterprise pollution emission database from 1998 to 2010,the impact of vertical management reform of district/county environmental protection agencies on SO2 and industrial soot pollution emission was investigated by using the research design of DID method.After a series of robustness tests,the heterogeneity of emission reduction effects of vertical management reform is explored from the perspectives of regions,industries and enterprises.Finally,from the perspective of micro enterprises,the specific emission reduction path of Chinese enterprises affected by vertical management reform is investigated.The following conclusions are drawn:The vertical management reform of district and county environmental protection bureaus has significantly inhibited the pollutant emission of local enterprises.Compared with the counties without vertical management reform,SO2 pollution emission of enterprises in the reformed counties decreased by 8.77%,industrial soot pollution emission of enterprises decreased by 1 7.51%,which significantly improved enterprise environmental performance.Combined with the analysis of regional differences,it is found that vertical management reform has more obvious emission reduction effects on eastern regions,areas with high pollution reduction pressure,and cities with low political constraints.Combined with the analysis of the difference between industries,it is found that the vertical management reform has significantly reduced the pollutant emissions of heavy polluting industries.Based on the heterogeneity of enterprises,it is found that vertical management reform significantly inhibits the emissions of enterprises with high pollution emission intensity,but has no effect on foreign enterprises in China.To further their own emissions of path analysis showed that the vertical management reform of abatement effect mainly through the adoption of cleaner production in enterprise production or production of raw materials,clean technology and equipment from the source to reduce pollutants,reduce industrial coal boiler usage in order to reduce fuel use,improve the efficiency of energy use,rather than the increase of pollutants end governance.Considering that in the process of environmental governance,in addition to the micro enterprise subjects,there are also multiple interactions between local governments,environmental regulatory agencies and other participating subjects,the natural question is:what will happen to the behavior of local governments,environmental regulatory agencies and other major participating subjects after the vertical management reform?In particular,how has the relationship with polluting enterprises changed?Not limited to micro enterprises,how does the vertical management reform play a role in reducing emissions?In order to answer the above questions,further expand the research perspective to the interactive game and behavioral decision-making of various participants in the process of environmental governance,return to the reform policy itself,combined with the design intention of vertical management reform,excavate the internal mechanism of vertical management reform from three aspects:environmental regulation efficiency,local selective protection,and resource reallocation effect.The following conclusions are drawn:the vertical management reform of local environmental protection mainly reduces pollutant emission by inhibiting the selective protection mechanism of local government and optimizing the efficiency of resource reallocation among enterprises,but not by improving the efficiency of environmental regulation.Specifically,the suppression of local selective protection is shown as follows:on the one hand,the reform significantly suppressed the pollutant emissions of state-owned enterprises,especially state-owned enterprises in heavy pollution industries,high pollution emission intensity state-owned enterprises,and stateowned enterprises subordinate to the local level:On the other hand.it has significantly reduced the pollutant emission levels of large taxpayers and large enterprises with high bargaining power.In general,the vertical management reform significantly inhibited the local government’s selective protection of polluting enterprises that are "closely related" or"highly dependent" on them,and weakened the local law enforcement bias.The effects of optimizing resource allocation are as follows:on the one hand,the reform has significantly inhibited the entry of heavy polluting enterprises,promoted the exit of heavy polluting enterprises,and improved the industrial structure of districts and counties;On the other hand.after the reform,the market share of enterprises engaged in cleaner production has increased,resources have been transferred to cleaner enterprises,and the resource reallocation effect among incumbent enterprises has been optimized,so as to reduce pollution emissions and improve environmental performance.After evaluating the environmental performance and mechanism of vertical management reform,this paper further takes the total factor productivity of enterprises as an example to evaluate the economic impact of the vertical management reform of the environmental supervision system,and preliminarily calculates the average emission reduction cost of China in each period,trying to pay attention to the balance and coordination between economic development and environmental governance,and evaluate the cost of environmental supervision.The study found that the vertical management reform significantly reduced the total factor productivity of enterprises in the pollution industry.Compared with non polluting enterprises in the same region,the total factor productivity of polluting enterprises decreased by 4.4%after the reform.Mechanism analysis found that the vertical management reform significantly reduced the per capita output of polluting enterprises,but did not force enterprises to innovate,and the negative effects mainly occurred after 2003.Finally,referring to the practice of he et al.(2020),a schematic costbenefit analysis was made by linking enterprise pollutant emission reduction with enterprise TFP.The results showed that for representative polluting enterprises,the total factor productivity of enterprises decreased by 5.2%for every 10%reduction in SO2 emission;For every 10%reduction in industrial soot emissions,the total factor productivity of enterprises will be reduced by 2.72%.Based on this,the economic cost that China needs to pay to achieve pollution reduction in various periods is roughly estimated.The results show that the total industrial SO2 emission during the 11th Five-Year Plan period has actually decreased by 14.29%,which will lead to a loss of 832.16 billion yuan in the total output value of the polluting industry,and a reduction of 29.86%in the total industrial soot emission,which will lead to a loss of 909.44 billion yuan in the total output value of the polluting industry.It can be seen that while implementing the pollution reduction strategy.we should pay attention to the emission reduction cost behind it,balance economic development and environmental governance,and how to achieve "win-win" between emission reduction and production increase will be the key issues that the future government needs to pay attention to in the process of formulating environmental regulation policies and promoting green transformation of enterprises.Compared with previous literatures,the possible marginal contribution of this paper is mainly reflected in:(1)This paper expands and enriches the research on the impact of the two regulatory modes of territorial management and vertical management of the environmental regulatory system,and takes the exogenous impact of the vertical management reform of environmental protection institutions from "districts/counties to prefecture level cities" as an example to provide empirical evidence for relevant theories and a new round of vertical management reform below the provincial level.On The one hand,the existing researches on territorial management or vertical management are either some viewpoint descriptions or news media reports,or logical deduction based on the theoretical level.They lack both research on specific environmental fields and empirical evidence support.This paper makes up for the lack of research on environmental protection vertical reform in the existing literature;On the other hand,although the vertical management reform of environmental protection institutions below the provincial level has been gradually tried out.the academic community has not yet reached a conclusion on the possible problems and policy effects of this reform,and little attention has been paid to the historical experience of the vertical management reform of environmental protection institutions from "districts/counties to prefecture level cities".The research in this paper can lead the academic community to further explore the experience and lessons of the vertical management reform of environmental protection institutions from "districts/counties to prefecture level cities",To better implement the vertical management reform of environmental protection institutions below the provincial level.(2)This paper manually collected samples of the national local environmental protection vertical reform,and combined with the pollution emission data of Chinese enterprises and industrial enterprise data to empirically study the effect of vertical management reform,which enriched the research on the effect evaluation of micro enterprise environmental regulation policies.The existing research on environmental regulation policy and pollution control mostly focuses on the regional or industrial level,especially the literature on vertical management reform,lacking the research from the perspective of micro enterprises.This paper identifies the strategic response behavior of micro enterprises to environmental regulation policy.and distinguishes the policy effect difference of environmental regulation policy on heterogeneous micro enterprises,which is conducive to a clearer understanding of the internal mechanism of environmental regulation policy.(3)This paper enriches the research on the cost analysis of environmental regulation in developing countries,makes a schematic cost-benefit analysis by linking the impact of vertical management reform on pollution reduction with the impact on the total factor productivity of enterprises,and further scientifically calculates the economic costs that China needs to pay to achieve pollution reduction in various periods,so as to provide a basis for the design of environmental regulation policies for governments at all levels and relevant departments The green transformation of enterprises provides empirical evidence for sustainable and high-quality development. |
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