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Pollutant reduction effects of vertical environmental reform in China

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Abstract

The vertical environmental reform in China has led to the change of environmental management system from territorial management model to vertical management model. This study uses the data of 263 prefecture-level cities in China to examine the effects of China’s vertical environmental reform on pollutant emissions, including industrial sulfur dioxide, wastewater emissions, and industrial fumes emissions. The findings demonstrate that vertical environmental reform resulted in a reduction in industrial sulfur dioxide, wastewater emissions, and industrial fumes emissions. And the governance effects is gradually enhanced with the passage of time, which are long-lasting effects. The above conclusions are still valid after a series of robust estimates including mitigating selection bias, placebo test, changing the dependent variables, and mitigating heterogeneous treatment effects. According to heterogeneity analysis, the vertical environmental reform has reduced the increase of pollutants caused by financial pressure and official associations, and treats border pollution problems more effectively. Under the decentralized governance system, the implementation of vertical environmental management helps to reduce local pollutant emissions. This conclusion provides the latest evidence from China for the academic debate on the advantages and disadvantages of territorial environmental management and vertical environmental management and also provides policy implications for the government’s environmental governance.

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Data availability

Some or all data, models, or codes generated or used during the study are available from the corresponding author upon request.

Notes

  1. There has been the sub-city environmental protection administrative management system reform viewing in Shanxi Province since 2002.

  2. An important reason for Shanxi Province’s implementation of sub-municipal vertical management reform in 2002 was the Han River water pollution incident in 2001, which sparked great concern in society as well as the central government.

  3. The approach of Callaway and Sant’Anna (2021) is very similar to Sun and Abraham (2021), while Sun and Abraham (2021) use the last treated cohorts as controls (effectively treating these cohorts as never-treated) and Callaway and Sant’Anna (2021) use all not-yet-treated cohorts as controls. Because all provinces finally implemented VER, this paper uses the method of Callaway and Sant’Anna (2021).

Abbreviations

SO2 :

Sulfur dioxide emissions

EPBs:

Environmental protection bureaus

VER:

Vertical environmental reform

MEE:

Ministry of Ecology and Environment

gdp:

Regional gross domestic product

dens:

Population density

ind:

Industry structure

fisc:

Fiscal pressure

fdi:

Foreign investment

acc:

Number of environmental emergencies in the previous year

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Funding

This work was supported by the Major Program of National Fund of Philosophy and Social Science of China (CN) (grant number 18ZDA040).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University, 100084, Beijing, People’s Republic of China

    Qibo Chen

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  1. Qibo Chen
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QC: conceptualization, methodology, investigation, data curation, software, visualization, writing, reviewing, and editing.

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Correspondence to Qibo Chen.

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Chen, Q. Pollutant reduction effects of vertical environmental reform in China. Environ Sci Pollut Res 31, 16805–16818 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-024-32107-5

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