The Study On China’s Urban Water Environment Regulation Performance

With economic development and people’s living standards improve, human enjoy city life while also facing unprecedented pressure on the environment. Water is an important resource for human’s life and production, but now facing serious dilemma pollution, the protection of water resource has become the focus of governmental attention. The environmental regulation of urban water industry started late in China, it develops immature, and the performance is in a low level. Although we have put a lot of manpower, material and financial resources, but the regulatory effect is not very significant, water pollution, declining water quality and other issues happened frequently. Due to its property of public goods and social welfare, water crisis will not only bring down the production, but. will also lead to a social panic. Therefore, protection of water resources, and improve the water environmental regulation efficiency is imperative.This paper describes the background and significance of urban water sector’s environmental regulation performance, and describing the current situation of the water industry’s environmental regulation, on the basis of domestic and international environmental regulation theory. And then take the DEA analysis and elastic analysis with environmental regulation of water resources input-output data through2003to2012, draw the development path of China’s environmental regulation performance over the past decade. We can know that although the environmental regulation performance of urban water is rising, but the level of regulation efficiency is still very low. In view of this fact, this article analyses the causes from government regulation departments, enterprises and the public sewage three aspects. From the government point of view, as the principal of urban water environment regulation, regulation department exists in many shortages, including the lag legislation of water environmental regulations; the lax enforcement of governments’ environmental regulation enforcement; performance evaluation system of regulation is imperfect, our laws of water resources environmental regulation are mostly old eldest, which its standards and current environmental issues are no longer applicable, and even more difficult to integrate with international standards; the lack of sound environmental regulation oversight mechanisms in government, government has a dual identity environmental regulation policy makers and implementers, it’s easy to make decisions which harm to the water environment on the drive of interests, because of the lack of external constraint forces, resulting in the "Government Regulations Failure"; our environmental regulation start late, and the regulatory instruments still remain in the single command-based tools, market incentive instruments have not been widely used. From enterprises and the public point of view, lack of awareness of environmental responsibility is the main reason of poor performance. Enterprises pay little attention to environmental protection under the guidance of "treatment after pollution". We can see the phenomenon of waste water, indiscriminate discharge of sewage and agricultural waste everywhere because of the lack of "responsibility to protect the environment". And on the other hand, public’s participation in environmental regulation is low, can not form an external oversight power which can constraint the behavior of government and corporate.We can know from the causes of urban water environmental regulation performance’s low efficiency, as the participants of environmental regulation, the behavior of enterprise, government and the public directly affects the level of efficiency. Therefore, this paper takes the game analysis of enterprises and government as well as government and the public. From the game analysis of government and enterprises we can know that the probability of enterprise pollution is inversely proportional to fine and proportional to the cost of government regulation. In order to reduce the possibility of sewage, on the one hand government should increase penalties of pollution, on the other hand government should improve the efficiency of regulation, reduce regulatory costs. From the game analysis of government and public we can know that public oversight and government actively enforcement always occur simultaneously, so we should strengthen public’s oversight of government behavior if we need governments’ active enforcement. On the basis of two sides of the game, the paper continues to introduce a tripartite pure strategy game model and mixed strategy game model of enterprise, government and the public. We can get the Nash equilibrium conditions of public oversight, the Nash equilibrium conditions of government and the companies conspired, the Nash equilibrium conditions of enterprise take rent-seeking. From these game analyses we can know, in order to enhance the efficiency of environmental regulation, we should increase punishment of corporate sewage behavior, and on the other hand, raise the level of public participation, form an external oversight power to constraints government action, prevent the formation of the government and corporate collusion. After the game analysis of enterprise, government and public, finally, we propose some policy recommendations from the perspective of participants in water environmental regulation. Specifically including legislative system improving, strengthen the regulatory enforcement actions, establishment the costs-revenue performance evaluation mechanism, innovative the regulatory tools and enhance the public participation in water environment regulation.