Does environmental decentralization exacerbate China's carbon emissions? Evidence based on dynamic threshold effect analysis

Abstract

As an institutional influential factor of environmental quality, environmental decentralization may play an important role in carbon emission control. Given China's rapid economic development and increasing environmental pollution, this study aims to investigate how environmental decentralization affects China's carbon emissions. Environmental decentralization indicators are reconstructed from the perspective of dynamic changes in the number of staff in environmental protection agencies on the basis of China's 30 provinces from 2005 to 2016. Spatial panel and dynamic threshold models are employed to investigate the impacts of environmental decentralization on carbon emissions. Results indicate that a remarkably positive spatial correlation is found in regional carbon emissions in China, and environmental decentralization has a positive impact on carbon emissions, suggesting that China's current environmental decentralization system may be unconducive to carbon emission control. Taking different environmental decentralization types as threshold variables, results from the dynamic threshold panel model show that environmental administrative decentralization and environmental monitoring decentralization have a positive threshold promoting effect on carbon emissions, whereas environmental supervision decentralization has a negative threshold inhibiting effect on carbon emissions. Therefore, the environmental administrative and monitoring power of local governments must be appropriately reduced and an environmental management mechanism must be developed for joint prevention and control to reduce carbon emissions.