Abstract
The main purpose of this article is to investigate the impact of social capital level on environmental governance efficiency in economically developed areas. We choose China’s richest province Guangdong. Compared with other Chinese provinces, Guangdong’s local governments are in better fiscal status, and they can allocate environmental spending in line with the trend of gross domestic product per capita. We want to observe the important factors related to social cognition other than capital investment to gain a more profound influence on the efficiency of local environmental governance. This article assumes that the degree of local social capital will have a great positive impact on the efficiency of regional environmental governance. Super-efficiency slacks-based measure method of data envelopment analysis is adopted to calculate the environmental governance efficiency by considering the expected output and the nonexpected output. Then, short-panel regression was used to analyze the relationship between social capital and environmental governance efficiency. Through an empirical analysis of urban panel data of Guangdong province from 2001 to 2019, it is found that the degree of social capital does have a significant positive impact on the efficiency of local environmental governance. After the research conclusion, we propose some policy suggestions to local governments.
Highlights
The ecological environment protection has become a major quandary of local governance in developed areas of China, as China has experienced more than 40 years of rapid economic growth since the reform and open-up policy and has realized that economic growth must change from high-speed to high-quality way
We can initially observe the general trend of correlation between environmental governance efficiency and social capital
This article studies the efficiency of environmental governance from a relatively new perspective of social cognition, and we have obtained good research results
Summary
The ecological environment protection has become a major quandary of local governance in developed areas of China, as China has experienced more than 40 years of rapid economic growth since the reform and open-up policy and has realized that economic growth must change from high-speed to high-quality way. Rapid economic growth at the expense of the environment has been very intuitively felt by citizens in their daily lives, and environmental deterioration has become the main cause of many serious diseases. As southeast China is a manufacturing hub, economic growth has had a big impact on environmental protection. This has forced the government to consider policies that balance economic development and environmental governance. We chose social capital to observe the influencing factors of environmental governance efficiency in affluent
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