Local Officials’ Turnover,Public-Private Partnerships And Urban Wastewater Treatment Efficiency

For a long time,under the "competition for growth" assessment system with economic growth as the core indicator,local officials tend to seek personal political promotion and overly pursue local economic growth,neglecting local pollution issues.In order to solve this problem,political incentives have become one of the important strategies to mobilize local officials to implement policies and guidelines,and environmental performance appraisal plays an increasingly critical role in official evaluation.At the same time,in the context of China transforming its economic development mode to green development mode,the problem of water pollution is still very serious.Urban industrial and domestic discharge is two of the most important sources of water pollution,but urban wastewater treatment is difficult to meet the needs of sustainable production and life,urban wastewater treatment efficiency needs to be improved,and the call for improving urban wastewater treatment infrastructure construction and operation mode is increasing.In this context,this paper fully considers that wastewater treatment is not only the earliest urban infrastructure to introduce the PPP mode as a pilot,but also the industry with the most PPP projects in China,combined with the importance of infrastructure construction under the PPP mode to officials’ political incentives,this paper studied the impact of local officials’ turnover on the efficiency of urban wastewater treatment.Firstly,this paper first sorts out the related studies of political incentives and environmental governance effects,political incentives and PPP,and PPP and environmental governance effects,and then puts forward the research hypotheses based on political incentive theory and principal-agent theory.Secondly,by collecting the data of all 1303 PPP wastewater treatment projects in 233 cities in China from 2014 to 2019,and matching it with the wastewater treatment efficiency data obtained based on the data envelopment analysis method and the manually collected local officials’ turnover data at the city level,the impact path of local officials’ turnover affecting urban wastewater treatment efficiency was studied with the help of Tobit,Probit and other regression models.The results show that,first,the turnover of local officials helps to improve the efficiency of urban wastewater treatment,and the mayor has a more significant positive impact on the efficiency of urban wastewater treatment than the secretary of the municipal party committee.Second,compared with cities without local officials’ turnover,wastewater treatment PPP projects are more likely to be established in cities where local officials are changed,and urban wastewater treatment PPP projects are more likely to be established after the change of the municipal party secretary.Third,the study further found that compared with local officials from other provinces,local officials from their own provinces have a more significant improvement in urban wastewater treatment efficiency and are more likely to set up local wastewater treatment PPP projects.Fourth,the adoption of PPP mode in the construction and operation of urban wastewater treatment infrastructure can help significantly improve the efficiency of urban wastewater treatment.PPP projects operated with feasibility gap subsidies,competitive procurement,and privatization can have a greater effect on the efficiency of municipal wastewater treatment.At the same time,in order to obtain priority support from government policies and funds,those PPP projects that have not yet entered the demonstration will also have a greater incentive effect on the efficiency of urban wastewater treatment than those that have entered the demonstration.Fifth,the impact of PPP mode on the efficiency of urban wastewater treatment will also be limited by the level of economic development,the degree of marketization and climatic conditions.Finally,based on the above conclusions,this study puts forward policy suggestions from the aspects of improving the official assessment system and the supervision,promotion and risk sharing of PPP projects.