Abstract
Management of economic growth targets is a universal measure employed by worldwide governments for macroeconomic regulation. This paper aims to empirically investigate the impact of economic growth targets set by governments of prefecture-level cities on the environmental regulation intensity. We extracted panel data on annual economic growth targets and environmental regulation indicators from the government work reports (2009–2016) of 284 China’s prefecture-level cities. The study concludes that an increase in economic growth target significantly weakens the intensity of environmental regulation. The conclusion still holds true after robustness tests, including changing measurement variables, regression samples, and conducting endogenous tests. The underlying reason for the inhibitory effect may be that in order to achieve economic growth targets, local governments prefer less stringent environmental regulations. They subsequently expand outputs in the short term by increasing the proportion of secondary industry in GDP, land transfer area, and fixed asset investment. Further research in this paper also finds that only cities with low economic development levels and low openness to the outside world experience the negative effect of a local government’s annual economic growth target on environmental regulation intensity.
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Data Availability
The datasets generated or analyzed during this study are not publicly available but are available from the first author on reasonable request.
Notes
Since the data is stable, there is no need to do a co-integration test. Therefore, the panel data regression used in this paper will not have the phenomenon of spurious regression, and the conclusion of this paper is credible.
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Acknowledgements
The authors contributed equally and are listed alphabetically. We gratefully acknowledge funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (no. 72073047), the Soft Science Project of Guangdong Province (no. 2016B070702002; no.2018B070714013), and the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (no. 2021A1515011983).
Funding
The paper is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant number: 72073047), the Soft Science Project of Guangdong Province (grant number: 2016B070702002; 2018B070714013), the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (grant number: 2021A1515011983).
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F. Y. L.: conceptualization, methodology, writing—original draft. Z. W.: data curation, software, writing—original draft. L. X. H.: supervision, visualization, writing—review and editing. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Li, F., Wang, Z. & Huang, L. Economic growth target and environmental regulation intensity: evidence from 284 cities in China. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29, 10235–10249 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-16269-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-16269-0