Does Leading Officials’ Accountability Audit Of Natural Resources Improve Enterprises’ Environmental Performance?

Since the implementation of China’s reform and opening-up policy in 1978,China’s economy has begun to flourish,and China has now become the world’s second largest economy after the United States.But the accompanying environmental pollution problems are particularly serious.According to research by Chen Shuo and Chen Ting(2014),since 2000,approximately 180,000 people in China have died each year due to pollution caused by SO2 emissions,incurring more than 300 billion yuan in treatment costs.Environmental pollution not only has a bad impact on the physical and mental health of the residents,but also caused a huge loss of wealth for the whole society.The Chinese government has always attached importance to the construction of an ecological civilization and has always been committed to balancing economic growth and environmental protection.And,the Chinese government has adopted many measures for environmental governance,including informal and formal systems.Informal systems are mainly implemented through public supervision and pressure on individuals.The formal system clearly stipulates the code of conduct for people in their interactions in written form.It is enforced by state agencies and is more binding than the informal system.Despite this,the effect of China’s environmental governance has been difficult to satisfy,and the inefficient implementation of policies is an undoubtedly important factor.Many literatures also point out that although China’s environmental law governance system is relatively complete,the efficiency of law enforcement is low,which is also an important problem facing China’s current environmental governance.Against this background,in November 2013,the Third Plenary Session of the Eighteenth Central Committee of the Party adopted the "Decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on Several Important Issues Concerning Comprehensively Deepening the Reform," which for the first time proposed "exploring the preparation of the balance sheet of natural resources and Does Leading Officials’ Accountability Audit of Natural Resources Improve Enterprises’ Environmental Performance?the implementation of leading official’s accountability audit of natural resources ".This further indicates that the assessment of leading official will incorporate natural resources and ecological environmental factors.In 2014,a pilot program for leading official’s accountability audit of natural resources began in some regions.As of October 2017,a total of 827 pilot projects have been implemented nationwide,and 1,210 leading official have been audited.After conducting the leading official’s accountability audit of natural resources,indicators for the construction of ecological civilization have been added to the official performance evaluation system.In order to win promotion opportunities and avoid being held accountable for environmental pollution problems,officials will no longer blindly chase economic development,but will invest their energy to protect the environment and save resources in their jurisdictions.At the same time,more environmental protection requirements will be imposed on the enterprises in the area under their jurisdiction,and the supervision and punishment of environmental pollution will be strengthened,and the pressure of environmental legitimacy will be greatly increased.In order to obtain legality,companies will further increase investment in environmental protection and improve their environmental performance.Based on those,the article takes the leading official’s accountability audit of natural resources pilots as the background,using non-financial listed companies from 2011 to 2016 as a sample,based on the manual arrangement of the areas and time of the leaving audit pilots,using the Difference-in-Difference method to examine the impact of the implementation of the leading official’s accountability audit of natural resources on corporate environmental performance.And conducted a robustness test on the conclusions: First,a balanced trend test is performed in this article,and the results show that the sample meets the equilibrium trend assumption.Second,the use of multi-period PSM-DID to overcome sample selectivity bias and unobservable effects over time;Third,excluding the impact of the new environmental protection law on the conclusions of this article,the results indicate that the conclusions of this article are still valid.The robustness test results still support the conclusions of this study.The conclusions of this article are as follows:(1)Pilot projects of the leading official’s accountability audit of natural resources can significantly improve corporate environmental performance.(2)The pilot of the leading official’s accountability audit of natural resources can improve the environmental performance of enterprises.This effect is more prominent in non-state-owned enterprises,but it is not obvious to state-owned enterprises.(3)The pilot of the leading official’s accountability audit of natural resources can improve the environmental performance of enterprises.This effect is more pronounced in enterprises in regions with lower marketization processes,but it is not obvious to enterprises in regions with a higher marketization process.