The Influence Of Official Turnover On Environmental Pollution

Since the reform and opening up,Chinese economy has developed rapidly and made remarkable achievements.From 1979 to 2014,the growth rate of GDP has reached 9.5%,which has been considered as "growth miracle".However,the environmental conditions in our country are getting worse and worse with the rapid economic growth.Not only the health of residents but also the sustainable development of society are threatened by the water pollution and atmospheric pollution.So more and more scholars began to analyze the phenomenon of high economic growth and high environmental pollution in China from the perspective of promotion of officials.In particular,local officials chase outstanding economic performance and ignore the environmental costs under the official evaluation system that uses GDP as the main assessment index.Could the changes in promotion incentives during the officials' whole tenure lead to changes in environmental pollution?Does the individual heterogeneity of the officials affect regional environmental pollution?Do the differences in the industrial distribution in the different part of China lead to differences in the intensity of impact on the regional environmental pollution during official replacement?These questions will be answered in this article.In this paper,we selected the identical index of 252 prefecture-level cities and their secretary of the municipal party committees from 2004 to 2013.And then we used the fixed effect model and differential GMM to test this panel data empirically.In the statistical description of the data,we found that from 2004 to 2013,there is about 25.39%municipal party secretaries changes every year in our country,and the average officials' term was about 4.53 years.In addition,during the 10 years,local officials haven't shown a young trend,and the proportion of female officials was still low,but the officials'education degree increased significantly.Based on the analysis above,we empirically examined the impact of the replacement of the officials on the regional environmental pollution.The main conclusion is that the environmental pollution measured by industrial fume emissions will be reduced during the replacement of officials.During the term of the officials,the environmental pollution has an inverted U type feature.Besides,the officials who have ever done the systemic work will have a positive impact on the environmental pollution in the year of replacement.As for the education degree,the higher the degree of officials,the more obvious the environmental pollution will be reduced during the replacement period.The officials promoting from other cities will improve environmental pollution more compared with the one promoting from local area.In the end,we divided the data into two subsamples---the East and Midwest,for regression.The results showed that during the change of officials,the environmental pollution in the midwestern regions reduced more than in the eastern region.In this paper,we focus on the influence of the replacement of local officials to environmental pollution which shows the influence of policy makers on the regional environment.And it is a new perspective for understanding the factors that influence environmental pollution.