Research On The Influence Of Fiscal Decentralization And Promotion Tournament On Local Environmental Quality In China

For a long time,Chinese style decentralization has been regarded by scholars as one of the important factors for the sustained and rapid economic development of our country.At the same time,the combination of economic decentralization and political centralization,as well as the traditional performance evaluation for local government officials with economic growth as the core,also results in the local fiscal expenditure structure is biased towards infrastructure and neglects public service.The deterioration of environmental quality is generally regarded as the negative output of this system.The traditional theory of fiscal decentralization holds that fiscal decentralization is conducive to the provision of quality public services by local governments,and environmental quality as a public product should be provided by local governments.On the impact of fiscal decentralization on environmental quality,the existing scholars have drawn different conclusions according to different periods and different range of data.This paper argues that the deterioration of local environmental quality does not originate from the fiscal decentralization system.Instead,it comes from the examination and incentive way of local officials behind political centralization,and the combination of fiscal decentralization and political incentive results in the deterioration of local environmental quality.Based on the above conjecture,This paper studies the local environmental quality in China from the perspective of Chinese style decentralization.This paper first analyzes the game behavior between central government and local government on environmental affairs from the angle of theory and demonstration,and concludes that local government will relax the enforcement of environmental standard when the supervision and punishment of central government are low.By establishing a two-stage game model,this paper studies the environmental strategies of local governments.The results show that the behaviors of local governments are not only affected by the degree of economic competition,but also by the spillover of environmental pollutants.According to the logical analysis and theoretical conclusions,four conjectures are put forward:fiscal decentralization is beneficial to the improvement of local environmental quality,and the combination of fiscal decentralization and promotion competition has a negative impact on environmental quality.The change of government assessment mode is beneficial to the improvement of local environmental quality,and the direction of influence of promotion competition on local environmental quality is related to the environmental spillover.Secondly,this paper verifies the conjecture from an empirical point of view.Because of the spillover nature of environmental pollution,"free rider"behavior can easily influence local government decision-making,this paper distinguishes the environmental pollutants according to the spillover,and defines the industrial solid waste as the weak spillover environmental quality.,industrial sulfur dioxide and industrial smoke dust are defined as strong spillover environmental quality;Similarly,because of the spillover of environmental pollution,there may be spatial correlation between the environmental quality of different regions,so the traditional measurement method is no longer applicable.In this paper,spatial panel model is used to study the relationship between Chinese style decentralization and local environmental quality by constructing inverse distance spatial weight matrix.Chinese style decentralization has the characteristics of economic decentralization and political centralization,the traditional performance evaluation for local government officials takes the GDP growth as the core,Local governments compete for promotion around GDP.This paper uses the most traditional fiscal decentralization index and the real GDP growth rate to depict these two characteristics.According to the logic of this article,The Chinese system of decentralization is an important reason for affecting the environmental quality of the region,and the performance evaluation for local government officials is an important driving force.In order to study the influence of the change of performance evaluation for local government officials mode on the regional environmental quality,this paper takes the Scientific concept of development of 2003 as the time limit to study it in different periods.Through the empirical test,this paper draws the following main conclusions:Firstly,at present,the decentralization of fiscal income and expenditure has a significant effect on the local weak spillover environment quality and the strong spillover environment quality.The first conjecture in this paper is confirmed that fiscal decentralization does not have a direct impact on the deterioration of local environmental quality.Secondly,The cross term of GDP growth rate and fiscal income decentralization or fiscal expenditure decentralization is significantly negative in the study of overall time period.That is,fiscal income decentralization and fiscal expenditure decentralization have a negative impact on local environmental quality through government competition channels,which further proves that the negative impact of decentralization system on local environmental quality is not the source of fiscal decentralization system itself.It comes from the competition of economic growth among local governments.The second conjecture in this paper is confirmed.Finally,in the study of the influence of fiscal decentralization and government competition on the local environmental quality,the increase of GDP growth rate in neighboring areas has a significant positive impact on the weak spillover environmental quality,and a negative impact on the strong spillover environmental quality.That is,the impact of government economic growth competition on environmental quality is related to environmental pollutants spillover.In accordance with the third conjecture in this paper.In the empirical study on the impact of the change of performance evaluation for local government officials mode on the local environmental quality,Before 2003,the increase of local GDP growth rate in neighboring areas had negative effects on comprehensive environmental quality,weak spillover environmental quality and strong spillover environmental quality,after the change of performance evaluation for local government officials mode in 2003,the impact of GDP growth rate on regional environmental quality has turned to positive improvement.The impact of GDP growth rate and fiscal decentralization on regional environmental quality is still negative,but the negative impact on regional environmental quality has been significantly reduced since the scientific development concept was put forward in 2003.All of the above prove that the incentive system of government officials'performance assessment has strong guidance,and the change of traditional assessment method is beneficial to the improvement of regional environmental quality.The last conjecture is verified.In short,fiscal decentralization is not a direct cause of the deterioration of local environmental quality in China,and the system of performance assessment and incentive for government officials is quite instructive.The combination of fiscal decentralization and government officials' incentive and assessment mechanism with economic growth as the core under political centralization is an important reason for the continuous deterioration of local environmental quality.In order to promote the improvement of local environmental quality,first of all,it is necessary to further improve the fiscal decentralization system,so that the fiscal decentralization system can play a better role.For this reason,it is necessary to clarify the scope of environmental protection rights and improve the transfer payment system.Second,innovation of local government incentive mechanism to promote the new government performance appraisal party.Finally,under the premise of maintaining fiscal decentralization,the cooperative management mode of spillover environmental pollutants in the region is explored.The innovation of this paper lies in that,firstly,environmental quality is divided into weak spillover environmental quality and strong spillover environmental quality according to spillover,secondly,regional GDP growth rate is used instead of traditional FDI index to describe government competition.Finally,the influence of the change of government assessment mode is investigated,and the research on the institutional factors behind the government competition is more in-depth.