Can environmental protection interview policy reduce air pollution? -A spatial difference-in-differences approach

Abstract

ABSTRACT The low efficiency of environmental policy implementation is an important issue in China’s environmental governance. The Environmental Protection Interview (EPI) policy is an administrative means for the central environmental protection department to urge local governments to earnestly fulfill their environmental protection responsibilities. This paper takes China’s EPI policy as a quasi-natural experiment. We use panel data of 261 prefecture-level cities in China from 2009 to 2018 as research sample and use spatial difference-in-differences (SDID) model to investigate the effect and mechanism of EPI policy on air pollution. The results show that EPI policy can effectively improve air quality, EPI policy has obvious spatial spillover effects. Namely, the EPI policy can not only reduce the local air pollution, but also reduce the air pollution in neighbouring cities. The EPI policy reduces the air pollution in the neighbouring cities within a spatial attenuation boundary of 400 km.The results of mechanism test show that the EPI policy can improve air quality by promoting industrial structure upgrading and technical advancement. Moreover, the pollution reduction effect of EPI is more significant in resource-based cities. The research results of this paper provide important reference for China and other developing countries to improve air quality.