Research On The Pollutant Emission Governance Effect Of The Central Environmental Protection Inspection

How to balance economic development and ecological civilization construction under the guidance of high-quality and sustainable development strategies is a major challenge facing China on the road of environmental governance.In 2015,China established a Central Environmental Protection Inspection System(CEPI)with the "supervising the government" as the core and "local party committee and local government have the same responsibility,one post and two responsibilities" as the focus,which innovated China’s environmental supervision mechanism.Since the beginning of 2016,China has launched the first-time central supervision for environmental protection,and completed the overall supervision of 31provinces(autonomous regions and municipalities directly under the central government)in two years.Subsequently,China launched the "looking back" review works in 2018 and completed the second inspection of 20 provinces and autonomous regions within one year.The significance of the inspection is to enhance the environmental protection awareness of the government and enterprises while improving the efficiency of local party committee and government in environmental governance.Therefore,the answer to the question whether the extremely innovative environmental policy can effectively reduce enterprise pollutant emission is not only the focus of social concern,but also the basis for the government to formulate policies.CEPI is a campaign-style environmental governance policy,which is influenced by the local governments and the public.In view of this,based on the 2015-2019 pollutant emission data of key national monitoring wastewater enterprises,this study incorporates fiscal decentralization and public participation into the research scope to explore the effect of CEPI on enterprise pollutant emission.The results indicated that: CEPI has a significant governance effect on enterprise pollutant emission,and the effect of the first-time central supervision for environmental protections is stronger than "looking back" review works.Moreover,both the first-time central supervision for environmental protections and the “looking back” review works have significant lag effects on enterprise pollutant emission,but the effect is weaker than when the inspection is carried out.The first-time central supervision for environmental protections has stronger governance effects on state-owned enterprises than non-state-owned enterprises,and the “looking back” review works only has a significant governance effect on state-owned enterprises.And both of the first-time central supervision for environmental protections and the “looking back” review works have significant reduction effects on enterprise pollutant emission in the earlier inspected regions.In addition,the moderating effects of fiscal decentralization and public participation is significantly positive,and both of the first-time central supervision for environmental protections and the “looking back” review works,the moderating effect of fiscal decentralization is stronger after the inspection ends than when the inspection is in progress,the moderating effect of public participation is stronger when the inspection is in progress than that after the inspection is over.Based on the results,this study proposes the following policy recommendations: First,promoting the normalization and legalization of CEPI.Second,adopting differentiated inspection strategies.Third,using big data to build a comprehensive pollution data monitoring system to reduce the information asymmetry between the central government,local governments,and enterprises.Fourth,building a long-term governance mechanism supported by public participation.Fifth,promoting enterprises to take the path of green and cleaner production to improve their competitiveness.