Abstract
This paper discusses how the pollution prevention mandate imposed by China’s central government triggers water pollution across provincial borders. Because the central government has put the pollutant reduction into the promotion evaluation, and pollution control in the downstream area of a province mainly brings benefit to other regions, the provincial officials are incentivized to reduce the water pollutants away from the downstream city and strengthen environmental regulation within the province. We apply the difference-in-differences-differences (DDD) method to the dataset on water quality in cities along 18 major rivers in China from 2007 through 2016. We find that compared with the interior cities, the most downstream city of a province faces worse water quality. Besides, we find that environmental policy significantly increases the extent of pollution across jurisdictional boundaries. Then, we turn on the mechanism and find that the pollutant reduction target is significantly lower in the most downstream city of a province. Unanticipated provincial government behavior leads to severe transboundary water pollution.
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Data Availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Notes
Dissolved oxygen between the interior and downstream border cities having a common trend. It indicates that the interaction between NH3 − N and dissolved oxygen could be partly alleviated because of common trend.
Although the central government implements the province-managing-county reform recently, the CPC system is still mainly governed way.
The data is from http://www.cnemc.cn/sssj/szzdjczb/index_24.shtml.
They set the city or country at the provincial border as 0; the other cities or countries are set as 1.
Most literature set the spatial weight matrix by assuming that only adjacent counties affect each other called “contiguity”or that spillover effects are proportional to the inverse of distance between cities.
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Funding
The research is financially supported by Science and Technology Youth Project of Chongqing Education Commission (KJQN20200052), National Science Foundation of China (71373297) and Social Science Planning Youth Project Foundation of Chongqing, China (2018QNJJ19).
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Qingyu Wang, Qing Ma, and Jinge Fu have the same contribution to the paper including conceptualization, methodology, software, data curation, writing—original draft, and validation.
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Highlights
• The provincial government strategically allocates the pollution reduction target in the province based on the local benefit.
• Environmental policy significantly increases the extent of pollution across jurisdictional boundaries.
• We take the difference-in-differences-differences method to estimate the effect of environmental policy, choose the interior cities, and dissolved oxygen as the control group.
• Transboundary pollution is a stable state that local governments and firms have no incentive to change it.
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Wang, Q., Ma, Q. & Fu, J. Can China’s pollution reduction mandates improve transboundary water pollution?. Environ Sci Pollut Res 28, 32446–32459 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-12840-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-12840-x