How Officials' Competitive Pressure Affects Sustainable Development Capacity From a Spatial Perspective: Empirical Evidence From China.

He Xu,Kun Wang,Yufeng Zhang,Guoping Li

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.607232

Abstract

The view of political achievements suggests that officials will prefer to implement measures that benefit their own development in order to seek promotions. In the past, GDP weighed heavily in officials’ appraisals, leading them to develop the economy without regard to sustainability. Now that the central government has incorporated environmental indicators into the officials’ appraisal system, will this lead officials to implement sustainable development strategies to the fullest extent? Are there spillover effects and regional heterogeneity in this role? This paper discusses these questions with the help of entropy method and a spatial Durbin model using data of 30 provincial-level regions in China from 2006 to 2016. The conclusions show that, firstly, the officials’ competitive pressure is beneficial to enhance the sustainable development capacity of the province, but this effect is only effective in western China. Secondly, there is no spillover effect of officials’ competitive pressure on sustainable development capacity; thirdly, foreign direct investment, the proportion of state-owned enterprises and environmental regulations have their own unique effects on sustainable development capacity, and there are spillover effects. Based on these findings, this paper proposes corresponding policy recommendations in terms of officials’ appraisal system, talent training, foreign investment introduction, and state-owned enterprise reform.

Highlights

The industrial revolution liberated productivity and greatly enriched the material life of human beings, but it was accompanied by a series of environmental pollution problems, which have become harmful to human life and survival
The coefficient of the indirect effect of officials’ competitive pressure (OCP) fails the significance test with a significance level of 10%, indicating that local OCP has no significant effect on the sustainable development capacity (SDC) of neighboring provinces, i.e., there is no significant spillover effect (H2 does not hold)
From: http://www.gov.cn/; investment, nationalization rate, and environmental regulation are good, and the coefficients of direct and indirect effects are mostly significant and their coefficient signs are more consistent with the previous expectations, indicating that they play the role of control variables

Summary

Introduction

The industrial revolution liberated productivity and greatly enriched the material life of human beings, but it was accompanied by a series of environmental pollution problems, which have become harmful to human life and survival. Industrial water pollution induces congenital malformations in infants (Dolk and Vrijheid, 2003), and plastic particles have been found in humans (Evangeliou et al, 2020). The growing ecological degradation and the awakening of environmental awareness determine that sustainable development will be a constant theme in the long term. As China enters the 21st century, it is still a developing country whose economic development model is mainly driven by factor inputs. The objective laws of economic development dictate that China’s economic development and ecological environment are in conflict with

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion