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Testing the Correlation between Eco-environmental Performance and Provincial Official Promotion in China

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Abstract

This study investigates how provincial top leaders’ promotion incentives drive their strategies for eco-environmental performance in China. Economic growth, a short-term interest, should be integrated with ecological sustainability, a long-term interest, for sustainable development. We used green efficiency and green total factor productivity as proxies for eco-environmental performance. We then utilized a generalized ordered logit model to analyze the relationship between eco-environmental performance and position change among provincial officials in China. For provincial party committee secretaries, the short-term political performance achieved by supporting and investing in non-green economic practices served only to prevent their demotion, as promotions were obtained via improving green efficiency; however, for provincial governors, improving green efficiency can both reduce the risk of demotion and increase the probability of promotion. After the implementation of the new Environmental Protection Law in 2015, improving green total factor productivity can more efficiently reduce the likelihood of demotion among provincial party committee secretaries while enhancing the effects of eco-environmental performance on position change among provincial party committee secretaries. Our study improves the single-oriented, super-efficiency data envelopment analysis model to optimize the process of solving both input- and output-oriented problems simultaneously and realizes efficiency ranking for eco-environmental performance among provincial officials. Furthermore, this finding deepens our understanding of both the promotion system for Chinese local leaders and motivations for eco-environmental performance.

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Notes

  1. In 2011 the State Council issued the 12th Five-Year Plan for National Environmental Protection and proposed to implement the one-vote veto system for environmental protection. Since then, governments at all levels have introduced the “one vote veto” and accountability measures for environmental protection. If the environmental protection objectives cannot be achieved in their jurisdiction, or there are major environmental pollution events, the relevant local officials will be subject to the one-vote veto.

  2. To ensure that GTFP is expressed in a clear and concise manner, the infinitesimal, \({\varepsilon s}_{i}^{t},\) has been omitted from \({L}_{0,i,y}^{1}\), \({L}_{0,i,e}^{1}\), \({L}_{0,i,u}^{1}\), and \({L}_{0,i}^{1}\).

  3. As the regression results for the control variables in Models (3–6) were similar to those in Models (1) and (2), only the regression results for the independent variables are reported in Table 4.

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Funding

This research was jointly funded by the Major Projects of National Social Science Foundation of China (grant no. 21ZDA006), the Projects of National Social Science Foundation of China (grant no. 20BGY102), and the “Carbon Peak and Carbon Neutrality” Philosophy and Social Science Research Project of Basic Research Operating Expenses of Jilin University (The Financial Support Mechanism of Energy Transformation under the “Double Carbon” Target). We would like to thank Editage (www.editage.cn) for English language editing.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Maritime Economics and Management, Dalian Maritime University, Dalian, 116026, Liaoning, China

    Haiying Liu, Zhiqun Zhang & Dianwu Wang

  2. Corporate Strategy Research Department, State Grid Energy Research Institute Co., Ltd., Beijing, 102209, China

    Yu Wang

  3. School of Business and Management, Jilin University, Changchun, 130012, Jilin, China

    Chunhong Zhang

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Haiying Liu has no conflicts of interest to declare that are relevant to the current of this article.

Zhiqun Zhang has no conflicts of interest to declare that are relevant to the current of this article.

Yu Wang has no conflicts of interest to declare that are relevant to the current of this article.

Chunhong Zhang has no conflicts of interest to declare that are relevant to the current of this article.

Dianwu Wang has no conflicts of interest to declare that are relevant to the current of this article.

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Liu, H., Zhang, Z., Wang, Y. et al. Testing the Correlation between Eco-environmental Performance and Provincial Official Promotion in China. J OF CHIN POLIT SCI 28, 375–399 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11366-022-09834-y

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