Environmental Legislation,Public Supervision And Environmental Improvement

In recent years,China’s economy is facing transformation and upgrading,and the medium and low-speed development of macro-economy in exchange for the improvement of environmental conditions.General Secretary Xi Jinping once pointed out that "we need not only green mountains and rivers,but also Jinshan and Yinshan.It is better to have green water and green hills than Jinshan and Yinshan,and green water and green hills are Jinshan and Yinshan.Therefore,the implementation effect of environmental policy has become a concern of many scholars.Based on the data of the provincial panel from 2005 to 2015 and the formal implementation of the new Water Pollution Prevention and Control Law in June 2008,this paper reviews the effect of the environmental regulation policy issued by the central government from two perspectives of water pollution reduction and water environment improvement by using the difference-in-differences model.Among them,according to the different ways of environmental pollution,the emission of pollutants can be divided into urban domestic pollution and industrial pollution to evaluate the emission reduction effect of environmental regulation.Further,referring to the previous literature,the study of industrial pollution emissions can be divided into two perspectives: one is the reduction of industrial pollution production caused by technological innovation and upgrading of production processes;the other is the increase of terminal treatment investment which leads to the increase of industrial pollution control.In this way,the mechanism of environmental policy on industrial pollution emission is investigated.Finally,public monitoring variables are introduced into the basic model,which can be divided into direct feedback and indirect feedback according to the different feedback mechanisms of public supervision,in order to examine the mechanism of the effect of environmental policy emission reduction.Through the analysis,the following conclusions are drawn:Overall,environmental legislation can effectively reduce water pollution emissions.Through further analysis,it is found that the emission reduction effect of environmental legislation is mainly achieved by restraining urban domestic pollution emissions,while environmental legislation has no significant restraint effect on industrial pollution emissions.No matter how much industrial pollution is produced or how much industrial pollution is treated,the positive effect of environmental legislation on emission reduction has been found.The effect of environmental legislation on the improvement of water environment is consistent with the previousone,which can find obvious positive effects.Public supervision is an important factor affecting environmental policy.When the public’s environmental rights and interests are infringed,they will spontaneously supervise the pollution behavior around their lives.There are obvious principal-agent problems between the central government and local government.There are many factors affecting environmental governance.The central government can not simply evaluate the local government’s behavior through the effect of environmental governance.At this time,the introduction of public supervision can provide effective supervision information for the central government.In the Internet era,which is widely popular in the self-media,the public can easily expose various environmental pollution behaviors,and it also provides the possibility for the central government to increase the punishment of environmental pollution.The empirical results show that the direct feedback mechanism of public supervision can not play a positive role in promoting the emission reduction effect of environmental legislation.This is due to incentive distortions of local governments under multiple promotion assessment mechanisms.Indirect feedback from public supervision can effectively promote environmental legislation to achieve emission reduction effect.In the era of self-Media for all,the central government should make more use of public supervision as a supplement to the environmental regulation policies issued by the government,so that it can play a better supporting role in environmental governance.