| Since the reform and opening up,China’s industrialization and urbanization have been rapidly promoted,and long-term reliance on the development strategy of heavy industry has promoted the rapid economic development.However,the rapid growth has also brought environmental costs that cannot be ignored.The carrying capacity of local ecological environment has reached its limit,and the ecological environment problems have suffered serious damage,which has brought heavy environmental pollution costs and social costs to China.Facing the increasingly serious environmental problems,improving the environmental quality,changing the mode of economic development,winning the tough battle of pollution prevention and control,and achieving high-quality economic development and ecological environment symbiosis and win-win have become important issues to improve public social welfare.As for the relationship between economic growth and environmental issues,the General Secretary put forward the conclusion that “Clear waters and green mountains are as good as mountains of gold and silver”.The report of the 20 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China took promoting green transformation and ecological harmony as the major goal of building a socialist modern country in an all-round way,and promoted high-quality economic development and the strategy of improving quality and efficiency.This requires that improving environmental quality requires not only improving the external supervision and accountability mechanism,environmental standards and approval system,but also taking into account the two major objectives of economic development and ecological environment.How to mobilize regions to handle the relationship between economic development and pollution reduction according to the laws revealed by the “Two Mountains Theory” can not be separated from financial and tax policy support,which requires a scientific grasp of the financial and economic impact of regional environmental regulations.Tax revenue is an important behavioral motivation and intervention mode of local governments.The research on the economic impact of local environmental governance policies should conduct a comprehensive empirical evaluation in combination with local economic growth and tax revenue,so as to promote the local environmental governance behavior to achieve a win-win situation in terms of ecological benefits and tax revenue benefits.In fact,China has formulated and implemented a large number of environmental policies,but there are still some problems in the effect of environmental governance,such as temporary and incomplete implementation.The reason lies in the serious information asymmetry in China’s environmental governance,which is manifested in the information asymmetry between central environmental policy and local environmental implementation,government environmental supervision and enterprise pollution discharge.The Environmental Air Quality Standard(2012)issued by the Ministry of Environmental Protection in 2012 implemented the real-time,unified and comprehensive disclosure of air pollution index information to the public,which greatly eased the asymmetry of environmental information among the central government,local governments,enterprises and the public,and formed an environmental governance system jointly governed by the government,enterprises and the public.It is an important turning point for China to strengthen the implementation of environmental regulations,enterprises to reduce emissions and pollution,and public supervision and participation.Based on this institutional background and local government behavior,this paper explores the tax economic impact of environmental information disclosure,analyzes the short-term and long-term impact of local tax revenue and the mechanism test of factor flow,and carefully examines the impact and heterogeneity of environmental information disclosure on factor flow from the micro level.Compared with the existing literature,this paper mainly does the following work and draws the following main conclusions:First,this paper discusses the institutional background,characteristics and theoretical influence mechanism of environmental information disclosure.Different from the traditional command type and market type environmental regulation policies,environmental information disclosure aims to stimulate the government,enterprises and the public to participate in a new model of environmental protection.It has a strong environmental regulation effect,greatly affects the local government incentive and restraint mechanisms,and brings about changes in the local economic development model and government behavior.At the same time,through the characteristic facts of environmental information disclosure,it is found that environmental information disclosure is helpful to improve residents’ environmental awareness and promote the closure and shutdown of polluting enterprises,and thus cause the flow of production factors.The strengthening of environmental governance has affected the scale and quality of tax sources due to the adjustment of regional tax structure,and has a longterm and short-term impact on local tax revenue,which provides a realistic basis for later research.This paper also analyzes the mechanism of environmental information on tax revenue from the perspective of the mechanism of factor flow,which provides theoretical support for the empirical test in the following chapters.Secondly,this paper analyzes the influence mechanism of environmental information disclosure on local tax revenue from the perspective of factor flow,and carefully examines the economic impact of environmental information disclosure on labor factors and capital factors from the micro level.On the one hand,this paper examines the relationship between environmental information disclosure and floating population’s willingness to live from the perspective of labor factor mobility.Before the environmental information is made public,the impact of pollution on residents is more influenced by personal perception,which often underestimates the level of environmental pollution.The cognitive deviation of pollution then affects the marginal willingness to pay of the environment,which brings the effectiveness of behavior decision.Environmental information disclosure breaks the barrier of pollution information,and full and comprehensive environmental information will greatly change individuals’ display preference for environmental quality.In this paper,an optimal decision-making model of population migration considering the asymmetry of environmental pollution information and urban livability is constructed.The marginal influence characteristics of local government environmental information disclosure on population migration are analyzed theoretically,and the compensation and crowdingout effects of regional wage level and environmental pollution on population migration are discussed.Based on the micro-survey data of dynamic monitoring of floating population in China,the influence of environmental information disclosure on labor migration is investigated.It is found that the disclosure of environmental information makes the floating population’s long-term residence intention decrease,and it leads to the migration of floating population by strengthening social environmental attention and environmental protection supervision.At the same time,there are significant differences in pollution level,public service level,industrial upgrading,labor force with different skills and wages in different regions due to the flow effect of environmental information disclosure.This study shows that the mobility of labor force is not only enhanced by the pollution awareness brought by sufficient information,which urges the labor force to actively escape from pollution,but also strengthened by the governance intensity brought by information disclosure,and the adjustment of labor demand scale and structure caused by the adjustment of regional industrial structure,which urges the labor force to migrate passively.On the other hand,this paper examines the relationship between environmental information disclosure and enterprise investment flow from the micro level.Considering that enterprises are not only the main body of pollution and emission reduction,but also the regulatory object of local environmental policies,this paper starts from the relationship between environmental information disclosure and capital factor flow,studies the behavior choice of micro-enterprises in environmental information disclosure,its influence on the cross-regional flow of enterprise investment,and the adjustment and change of investment scale and structure,and reveals the redistribution effect of investment resources of enterprises under environmental information disclosure and the phenomenon of pollution shelters within enterprise groups.In this paper,a simple general equilibrium model of enterprise production,pollution reduction and enterprise entry and exit are constructed to investigate the influence of environmental regulation on enterprise compliance cost and capital investment,and the investment difference of different productivity levels and the green technology investment effect of enterprises under regulation are given.Based on the information of listed companies and their affiliated enterprises,this paper constructs the data of enterprise-city pairs,examines the influence of environmental information disclosure on the local and cross-regional investment scale and structural differences of investment departments of listed companies,and identifies the two-way flow of enterprise investment behavior under environmental information disclosure by using geographical differences.The empirical results show that the regulatory effect of environmental information disclosure increases the internal environmental emission reduction cost of enterprises,and the transition pressure of transformation and upgrading squeezes out the productive investment,which leads to the decline of the overall investment capacity and demand of enterprises,and generally reduces the investment scale of enterprises,and the reduction effect of enterprise investment scale is more significant for small and medium-sized enterprises with low productivity and weak market competitiveness.Information disclosure makes capital elements flow within enterprise groups and reallocate among industries,mainly across provinces to undisclosed areas,and more reflected in the migration and flow of productive investment.Finally,this paper unifies the research perspective to the level of local government behavior,integrates the economic mechanism results of factor flow into the analysis of this chapter,explores the short-term and long-term policy effects of environmental information disclosure from local tax revenue,and tests the role of environmental information disclosure in balancing environmental effects and economic benefits.Using the panel data of prefecture-level cities,this paper examines the impact of environmental information disclosure on the scale of local tax revenue.It is found that the regulatory effect of environmental information disclosure makes regional labor and capital factors flow,leading to the closure and transfer of more highly polluting enterprises and labor migration,and the scale of local tax sources decreases significantly in a short time.But from the perspective of long-term effect,with the continuous upgrading of industrial structure,the tax source structure becomes cleaner and higher quality.Environmental information disclosure has the dual benefits of ecological governance and tax economy,and in the long run,it helps to improve the quality of local tax sources and the ability of sustainable development,and reveals the important connotation of "two mountains theory".This paper analyzes and tests the trade-off path of local government’s development goals.Environmental information disclosure makes local governments change their development goals,and tends to strengthen ecological and environmental protection goals while weakening economic goals,so as to achieve regional green,sustainable and high-quality development faster.The research of this paper has important policy implications for understanding the financial motivation and interactive logic of local governments’ environmental governance in China,as well as regional coordinated development policies and pollution prevention and control systems.Under the background of pollution prevention,industrial transformation and upgrading to promote high-quality development,the conclusion of this paper reveals that environmental information disclosure has dual effects of ecology and economy,smoothing the asymmetry of environmental information among multiple subjects.By strengthening the environmental accountability mechanism,improving the efficiency of environmental governance,accelerating industrial transformation and green upgrading,and interregional collaborative governance,the incentive and restraint mechanism of local governments’ environmental governance behavior will be changed,and the ecological environment quality and sustainable and high-quality economic development will be realized. |
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