Research on the Impact of the County-to-District Reform on Environmental Pollution in China

Abstract

Based on the panel data of 267 prefecture-level cities in China from 2003 to 2016, this paper adopts propensity score matching (PSM) and difference-in-difference (DID) as research methods to test and analyze the impact effect of the county-to-district reform on the environmental pollution. The results show that: (1) The county-to-district reforms have significantly increased the urban environmental pollution. After changing the time and space sample size of the reformed cities, there is no obvious difference in the estimated results; (2) In terms of time, the impact of the county-to-district reforms on environmental pollution has a short-term dynamic, and there is a difference between industrial wastewater pollution and industrial waste-gas pollution; (3) By region, the eastern cities have significantly increased the level of environmental pollution after the county-to-district reforms, both the coefficient and the significance level of the cities in the Mid-West are weaker than those in the East, and presents Eastern > Central > Western; (4) Mechanism testing shows that the county-to-district reforms significantly expand urban space and agglomerate population. The former exacerbates the effects of environmental pollution, while the latter suppresses the growth of environmental pollution. Therefore, it is necessary for the government to reduce the institutional constraints of population migration to big cities and blind land expansion so as to promote pollution reduction.