Research On The Environmental Protection Effect Of Local Ecological Transfer Payment

During the past over four decades of reform and opening up,our country’s economic strength has experienced a remarkable “miracle” growth,but also paid a heavy price in the ecological environment.At the present stage,ecological environment problem has become one of the main bottlenecks restricting China’s economic and social sustainable development,and how to use economic means to achieve the ecological environment protection effectively has also become one of the important contents of the government work.In order to better guide and encourage local governments to carry out ecological environment protection work,China put forward the principle of “who develops who protects,who benefits who compensates” for the first time to accelerate the establishment of ecological compensation mechanism in the “11th Five-year Plan” in 2005.Since 2008,China has started to explore the ecological transfer payment both at the national and local levels.The total amount of capital input and the scope of subsidies have increased year by year,which has become the most important way to implement the ecological compensation mechanism in China.With the development of the related research on the ecological transfer payment,the research results about the system are also emerging in endlessly.At present,the academic achievements of ecological transfer payment in China mainly take the national key ecological function areas as the research objects,or focus on the design of horizontal ecological transfer payment.Zhejiang province,as the first province to carry out ecological transfer payment from province level to county level,is representative in the study of local ecological transfer payment.Against this background,this paper takes 38 counties of Zhejiang province,including Fu Yang,Tong Lu,Lin An and etc.,as examples to explore whether the ecological transfer payment enforced in Zhejiang province has effectively realized the policy objectives of environmental quality improvement.The main content is divided into the following three parts:The first part is the theoretical basis of this paper,which includes the first chapter and the second chapter.The first chapter starts from our country’s development strategy and the current contradiction between economic development and ecological environment,then expounds the research purpose,significance,content and methods of this paper.Besides,this chapter summarizes the existing research results through carding the related literature at home and abroad and points out that the domestic research in local ecological transfer payment still have a gap to be filled.The second chapter firstly explains the concept of fiscal transfer payment and ecological transfer payments,and secondly discusses the importance of the construction of ecological transfer payment system and its internal mechanisms based on the ecological value theory,public goods theory and externality theory.The second part includes chapter three and chapter four,which is the core part of this paper.Taking national key ecological functional areas and Zhejiang province as examples,the third chapter mainly introduces the practice progress of vertical ecological transfer payment system and horizontal ecological compensation mechanism in China through the introduction and comparison of relevant policy documents.The forth chapter firstly calculates the ecological environment index based on the per capita emission of industrial wastewater,industrial sulfur dioxide and industrial smoke and dust with the help of entropy method.The statistical analysis of the obtained results reflects the fact that the ecological environment level of 38 counties(cities)in Zhejiang province between 2009 and 2013 needs to be improved.Secondly,by means of the proposed research hypothesis,the model is built with the ecological environment index and per capita ecological transfer payment as interpreted and explanatory variables,the interaction term represesnted by the per capita ecological transfer payments and the local environmental spending as intermediary variables,as well as local fiscal revenue,urbanization rate,per capita income gap between urban and rural areas,population density as control variables.The empirical analysis,conducted by using clustering robust standard error of the bidirectional fixed effect model,investigates the local ecological environment protection of transfer payment and whether the efforts of local government made to environmental protection will influence the degree of this effect.Besides,the regional heterogeneity is analyzed based on the level of fiscal self-sufficiency.The empirical results show that the investment of ecological transfer payment helps to improve the quality of local ecological environment,but the overall efficiency is not high.Local governments’ emphasis on environmental protection only promote the performance of ecological transfer payment in regional groups with high financial self-sufficiency.The empirical results above have also been verified by the robustness test.The third part is the fifth chapter.According to the results of theoretical and empirical research on the environmental protection effect of ecological transfer payment in Zhejiang province,this paper believes that based on the conclusion that ecological transfer payment can indeed improve the quality of ecological environment,we should improve the implementation effect through practical ways.Combined with the research conclusion and policy practice progress,this paper proposes that the local ecological transfer payment can be improved from the following four aspects:(1)increase the total amount of capital input and optimize the distribution pattern,(2)perfect the supervision of the capital and the performance appraisal method to improve the policy’s incentives,(3)accelerate the establishment of a horizontal ecological transfer payment system and enhance the regional collaborative governance capability,(4)strengthen laws and regulations and create a favorable institutional environment.