The Significance And Limits Of Environmental Assessment

This paper attempts to use the evidence from the prefecture-level cities to answer the following questions centering on the environmental assessment:First,with the increase in the weight of environmental assessment in local government assessments,have the regional environmental conditions been significantly improved?Second,will the environmental assessments be implemented by local officials in different ways,and which kind of officials may respond more actively?Third,in the face of the conflict between environmental assessment and economic assessment,what strategies will officials adopt?This paper uses the empirical analysis based on the panel data of 109 prefecture-level cities in China from 2003 to 2012 to answer the above questions.The study found that:First,after the central government introduced a document with more stringent and detailed environmental assessments in 2006,the weight of environmental assessment in the evaluation system of officials has increased,which has significantly improved the level of the environment in the region.Both the environmental assessment indicators SO2 and COD emissions,as well as the indicators of environmental governance of industrial wastewater and API,have all declined significantly after 2006.In addition,environmental protection investment in the cities has risen after the weight of environmental assessments has increased,accompanied by a slowdown in GDP growth rate.Second,environmental assessments have been implemented by local officials discrepantly.After the increase in environmental assessment weights,the municipal party committee secretary with relatively weak political incentives and relatively low promotion probability prefers to invest more in environmental protection and will make the local pollution situation improve faster.However,the difference between these two is not significant,indicating that the environmental assessment may not affect the behavior of officials through the promotion mechanism.The existence of an accountability system and a one-vote veto system urges the municipal party committee secretary to carry out environmental assessment tasks.Third,when facing multiple tasks and being evaluated multiple indicators,local government tend to implement more important tasks or indicators.The empirical results show that compared with the key assessment indicators SO2 and COD,the governance effect of non-assessment indicators of industrial wastewater emissions and API index is slightly less pronounced.In addition,the above conclusions have been verified by the empirical analysis of the environmental control cities and the comparison cities before and after the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.Based on the above work,the study fully demonstrated the positive significance of environmental assessment,pointing out that local officials with different political incentives will respond differently to environmental assessments and improve the discussion on the evaluation mechanism of officials.Finally,it puts forward the deficiencies in the study and feasible thoughts to improve this research.