Abstract
China relies on the total pollutant emission control and environmental target responsibility system to curb environmental pollution and improve energy conversation. How the central government breaks down environmental targets among provincial governments lies at the core, but little research has been done to explore the determinants of environmental target-setting empirically. This work models the decomposition process of environmental targets by focusing on the roles of historical performance and provinces’ political status. With the method of hierarchical linear model, data on five kinds of environmental obligatory targets (energy consumption per unit GDP and other four kinds of pollutants) during China’s “12th Five-year Plan” period is used to test the hypotheses. The results show that provincial historical structural performance is negatively significantly correlated with their environmental target levels, while the effects of historical scale performance and intensity performance are not significant. Besides, provinces with higher political rankings tend to be allocated higher targets, which is in accordance with the model effect hypothesis rather than the bargaining effect hypothesis.
Highlights
IntroductionMany countries in the world have already adopted various kinds of result-oriented goal management reforms [1,2,3,4]
Echoing management by objectives, many countries in the world have already adopted various kinds of result-oriented goal management reforms [1,2,3,4]
Anticipated targets refer to the development goals that the central government and local governments expect to achieve and set by themselves (e.g., Gross Domestic Product (GDP)), while obligatory targets refer to the task requirements for local governments that are allocated or set by their superior governments in public service and other policy domains involving public interest
Summary
Many countries in the world have already adopted various kinds of result-oriented goal management reforms [1,2,3,4]. Anticipated targets refer to the development goals that the central government and local governments expect to achieve and set by themselves (e.g., GDP), while obligatory targets refer to the task requirements for local governments that are allocated or set by their superior governments in public service and other policy domains involving public interest (e.g., pollutant emission control). Previous research on goal-setting concentrated only on anticipated targets [10,11,12] and failed to explore determinants of the setting of obligatory targets. There is a great difference between the setting of anticipated targets and obligatory targets in China, because anticipated targets are set by local governments independently and obligatory targets are allocated by their superior governments, local governments can express their own opinions or adjust the targets in the decomposition of obligatory targets to some extent [13]
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