Environmental Regulation And Political Turnover:Evidence From Local Officials In China

Thanks to the Reform and Opening,China's economy has developed at a continuously high speed.Besides the remarkable achievement,environmental pollution and excessive energy consumption have become even more serious.One reason for this phenomenon is the excessive pursuit of political promotion incentive based on economic growth by local officials.In order to tackle this problem and constrain the behavior of local officials,one solution taken by Chinese government is to defined environmental assessment indicator as a binding indicator since the 11th Five-Year Plan and put this indicator into the evaluation mechanism of local officials.The panel data of 284 cities in China from 2000 to 2009 has been employed in order to study the relationship between environmental assessment and officials'promotion through the Probit model and DID estimation.The result shows that better economic and environmental performance has effectively promoted the promotion of local mayors.The impact of environmental performance on the promotion of officials has been greatly changed due to the policy shock in which the Chinese government proposed resource and environmental constraints in the national"Eleventh Five-Year Plan" for the first time.The response to the polity varied by regions,the eastern region is more sensitive than the others.A triple difference model has been constructed to investigate the relationship between spatial unbalanced environmental regulation and the layout of energy-intensive industries'production in order to test the existence of"Pollution Heaven"hypothesis.The empirical result shows that spatial unbalanced environmental regulation causes the relocation of energy-intensive industries'production,and led to the transfer of pollution to areas with weak environmental regulation,also the relocation of energy-intensive industries' production will have some effect on the promotion of officials.