Environmental Governance Efficiency Research Articles

RESEARCH ON THE INTERNAL MOTIVATION OF GREEN INNOVATION IN ENTERPRISES

This paper mainly establishes the internal driving model of enterprises' green innovation behavior, deeply studies the internal factors that affect enterprises' green innovation, and analyzes its influencing mechanisms. Based on the theories of planned behavior, reputation theory, and political promotion championship theory, this paper deeply explores the internal driving factors and influencing relationships of corporate green innovation behavior from the perspective of micro-research within enterprises and further examines the characteristics of enterprises such as enterprise size, enterprise nature, and industry attributes. This paper explores whether there is a moderating effect on the internal driving force of green innovation behavior.
 The results show that: (1) the motivation of enterprises to avoid environmental penalties, the motivation to obtain environmental protection honors, and the motivation for political promotion of senior executives of state-owned enterprises all have a promoting effect on the green innovation behavior of enterprises; (2) In state-owned enterprises, the motivation for avoiding environmental penalties, the motivation for obtaining environmental protection honors, and the motivation for executive promotion have a better positive impact on green innovation than that of non-state-owned enterprises. The conclusions of this study broaden the research perspective of the related fields of green innovation behavior, enrich the theoretical research scope of the influencing factors of corporate green innovation behavior, and enrich the relevant research on the influence of enterprise characteristics on corporate behavior. It will help to improve the scientific formulation of supervision and incentive mechanisms by government managers, provide methods for enterprises to improve the efficiency of environmental governance, and also help the public to recognize and understand the internal influencing factors of corporate green innovation, providing a new perspective for social supervision.

Does the digital economy reduce air pollution? Evidence from 30 Chinese provinces and municipalities

ABSTRACT Our study aims to investigate whether and how the development of the digital economy can reduce air pollutant emissions in China. Specifically, using a fixed effect model and an empirical test that exploits pollutant emissions in 30 Chinese provinces from 2011 to 2020, we explore the impact of digital economy development on air pollution through three mechanisms: public attention to environmental pollution, production efficiency, and environmental governance efficiency. Additionally, we provide heterogeneity analysis based on regions, industrial structure, and years of schooling. Findings are crucial for policymakers and environmentalists concerned about economic development’s effects on the environment.

New way out of efficiency-equity dilemma: Digital technology empowerment for local government environmental governance

Getting out of the dilemma of incompatibility between efficiency and equity is an important goal of local government to modernize their environmental governance. Based on the theory of public value management, this paper constructs an analytical framework for digital technology enabled government environmental governance under the perspectives of efficiency, equity and coupling of the two, then empirically examines the impact and mechanism. The results show that digital technology can enhance efficiency and equity of local government environmental governance. Meanwhile, digital technology is an effective way to solve conflict between efficiency and equity values, but its green effect may be weakened in the short term due to uncertainty risks of internet. Education can strengthen green effect of digital technology, and digital dividend is especially beneficial when years of education has reached a certain threshold. In addition, there are heterogeneity and spatial correlation in digital technology to improve local government environmental governance. Finally, the results of mechanism test show that digital technology realizes enabling effect through three paths: industrial structure optimization effect, social public participation effect and innovation and entrepreneurship effect. The findings of this paper enrich research literatures on government environmental governance empowered by digital technology, and also provide useful references for formulation and implementation of government environmental policies under the new development pattern.

Analysis of spatial correlation characteristics and key factors of regional environmental governance efficiency in China

Analysis of spatial correlation characteristics and key factors of regional environmental governance efficiency in China

Two-Way FDI Synergy and Water Environmental Management Efficiency—An Empirical Study on the Mediating Effect of Heterogeneous Technological Innovation

In the context of China’s synergistic development of import and export strategies and water environmental protection, this paper analyzes the role of two-way FDI synergistic development in water environmental governance efficiency based on panel data of 30 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions in China from 2004 to 2021. The paper uses a fixed effect model and analyzes the role of heterogeneous technological innovation using the mediation effect model and the panel threshold model. The results of the study show the following: (1) overall, two-way FDI synergistic development helps to improve China’s water environmental governance efficiency; (2) there is regional heterogeneity in the effect of two-way FDI synergistic development on China’s water environmental governance efficiency, with a significant positive effect in areas along the coast and with high FDI synergistic development levels and an inhibitory effect in inland areas; and (3) the two-way FDI synergy enhances the efficiency of China’s water environmental governance by improving the levels of independent innovation and imitation innovation.

Does regional collaborative governance reduce air pollution? Quasi-experimental evidence from China

Regional collaborative governance has become one of the most significant trends in environmental protection due to its importance in suppressing pollution transfer. This paper employs panel data from 285 cities in China during 2003–2019 and a multi-period difference-in-differences (DID) method to evaluate the influence of regional collaborative governance on air pollution. Results show that regional collaborative governance significantly reduces air pollution. Heterogeneity assessment suggests that the inhibiting impact of regional collaborative governance on air pollution is long-term and increases temporally, whereas the spillover effect of regional collaborative governance is only significant in a specific range and decays spatially. In addition, the mechanism analysis reveals that regional collaborative governance reduces air pollution by increasing environmental regulation intensity, improving environmental governance efficiency, and promoting environmental protection technology. This study provides useful policy insights for policymakers seeking green and sustainable development to curb air pollution and improve environmental quality.

The impact of anti‐corruption on environmental governance efficiency in China: A study based on spatial effect

AbstractAnti‐corruption is an important initiative in China's national governance system. The existing literature usually studies the direct impact of corruption or anti‐corruption on China's environment, while few studies show the spatial correlation impact of anti‐corruption on China's environmental governance. This paper redefines anti‐corruption, uses panel data of 30 Chinese provinces and cities from 2005 to 2019, and empirically analyzes the impact of anti‐corruption on environmental governance efficiency in China using spatial Durbin model. The findings indicate that the direct effect of anti‐corruption on environmental governance efficiency is positive, indicating that increasing anti‐corruption efforts will help improve local environmental governance efficiency; indirect effect of anti‐corruption on environmental governance efficiency is negative, suggesting that due to the existence of “pollution heaven” effect, the strengthening of anti‐corruption in the local region will cause polluting industries to move from local region to neighboring regions, leading to serious environmental pollution in the neighboring regions, and then reducing environmental governance efficiency. The indirect effect of economic development, industrial structure, and economic openness are negative, while the indirect effect of urbanization rate and clean energy are positive. The findings of the study provide a theoretical basis and insight for governments at all levels to improve environmental governance efficiency through anti‐corruption.

The impact of globalization on comprehensive environmental efficiency and its sub‐stage efficiencies: An adjusted range adjusted measure network data envelopment analysis model approach

AbstractGlobalization is a worldwide trend, and environmental governance requires global cooperation. There are environmental issues caused by globalization, such as “environmental justice” and “externalization of cost.” However, several key questions remain about the impact of globalization on the environment. This article attempts to decompose the comprehensive environmental efficiency and analyze their inner relationship its determinants. This study adopts range adjusted measure network data envelopment analysis (DEA) model to measure the overall efficiency and decompose comprehensive efficiency into two stages and investigate the interrelationship among them, based on the data from 30 cities along the Yangtze River. This can reveal the “black box” of the DEA and the interrelationship between each stage. The panel quantile method is adopted to analyze the impact of influencing factors, especially globalization, on efficiency. This article creatively builds the in‐depth openness index to measure the tendency of in‐depth openness. The following findings are identified: (1) Among sub‐stages, environmental governance efficiency plays a more significant role in comprehensive environmental efficiency. (2) Foreign direct investment, urbanization, and industrial structure negatively influence efficiency, while the degree of openness, per capita GDP, and population density are positive determinants. (3) With the decrease of the HUANG index, the impact of globalization on the local environment shifted from supporting the pollution halo hypothesis toward supporting the pollution haven hypothesis. (4) Sustainability with harmony between humans and nature is recommended and can be achieved. The result of this study can help policymakers to find an effective way to achieve sustainability and improve the environmental efficiency effectively.

Regional Differences in PM2.5 Environmental Efficiency and Its Driving Mechanism in Zhejiang Province, China

Improving the digital economy and environmental governance efficiency are important methods for current high-quality economic development. Based on the panel data of 11 cities in Zhejiang, on the eastern coast of China, fine particulate matter smaller than a 2.5 μm (PM2.5) environmental efficiency (PMEE) was measured by the undesirable output Slack-Based Measure-Data Envelopment Analysis (SBM-DEA) model. The fixed effect regression model, the divergences in the difference model and other empirical methods were obtained to test the driving mechanism of social-economic factors on the PMEE. The results showed that: (1) the concentration of PM2.5 was continually decreasing, and environmental quality experienced a continuous improvement in Zhejiang province in the observation period, although cities such as Hangzhou, Jiaxing and Shaoxing have relatively severe PM2.5 pollution. (2) The total average value of PMEE in Zhejiang was 0.6430 over the observation period, while there was still a lot of room for improvement when compared to the production frontier. Additionally, PMEE in each city showed a fluctuating growth trend. Cities with a higher PMEE were mainly Zhoushan, Hangzhou and Ningbo. (3) The level of the digital economy had a positive role in promoting the PMEE, which was statistically significant. The level of pollution control and technological innovation also had a significantly positive effect. However, the ratio of the industrial output value to the gross domestic product (GDP) presented a negative effect on the PMEE. In the future, it is suggested that the development of the urban digital economy should be accelerated in an all-around way to improve the efficiency of government pollution control and to improve the technical efficiency of PM2.5 via innovative technological progress.

Efficiency Calculation and Evaluation of Environmental Governance Using the Theory of Production, Life, and Ecology Based on Panel Data from 27 Provinces in China from 2003 to 2020

Promoting green development and promoting harmonious coexistence between humans and nature are strategic tasks for the construction of ecological civilization in China in the new era. Currently, the growing environmental governance investment in China has not performed well, and the low efficiency of environmental governance has become the main problem facing the development of ecological civilization in China. Therefore, it is of great practical significance to scientifically measure the efficiency of environmental governance and improve the efficiency of environmental governance input factors to achieve green development and overcome the difficulties in the construction of ecological civilization. In this study, an improved three-stage SBM model and cloud model combined with the Theory of production, life, and ecology were used to measure the environmental governance efficiency of 27 provinces in China from 2003 to 2020 and conduct in-depth analysis and evaluation. The results show that: First, the influence of random error factors and external environmental conditions on the efficiency of rural domestic sewage treatment in China is significant. Their existence will underestimate the environmental governance efficiency in the central and western regions of China and overestimate the environmental governance efficiency in the eastern regions of China, except for Hainan Province. Second, after excluding the influence of random errors and external environment conditions, the adjusted efficiency mean value of the central and western regions significantly increases, while the environmental governance efficiency of most provinces in the eastern region, except for Hainan Province, decreases significantly. Third, the overall environmental governance efficiency of the 27 provinces in China still presents a situation wherein the western region is ranked first in efficiency, the eastern region ranks second, and the central region ranks third. The environmental governance efficiency of the 27 provinces shows a “large at both ends, small in the middle” and “low efficiency in the eastern and central regions, and instability in the western region” state, and there is a large difference in the degree of environmental governance efficiency among the various provinces. In this regard, for the eastern and central regions, special attention should be paid to their government’s transformation of development thinking, placing greater emphasis on balanced and coordinated development between urbanization, industrialization, and the environment. As for the western region, due to its harsh environmental conditions, it attaches more importance to environmental governance. However, efforts should be made to strengthen its economic development to ensure sufficient provision of material conditions such as infrastructure and equipment required for environmental governance in order to achieve stable environmental governance efficiency in the western region. For the central region, both the economy and the environment need to be further strengthened.

Surveillance of public risk perceptions on outdoor air pollution: evidence from online search behaviours in China

Severe outdoor air pollution in China has long constituted a threat to public health and environmental governance efficiency. Surveillance of online search behaviours that reflect real-time public risk perception and behavioural responses on environmental issues is essential in improving environmental governance. However, owing to the absence of an appropriate analytical framework, quantitative evidence of analysing online data is scarce in the extant research. To address this research gap, we analysed Baidu search indexes (BSI) keywords relevant to the public risk perception and behavioural responses on outdoor air pollution by a surveillance framework consisting of two parallel steps (prediction and monitoring). The proposed framework may improve environmental risk governance efficiency and benefit environmental risk governance policy decision-making through considering real-time public risk perceptions and behavioural response information. Using online search behaviour data, this study adds to the methodology for improving the efficacy of environmental social risk governance.

Achieving Harmony between the Economy and the Environment

Rather than attempting to balance the environment with the economy (i.e., a zero-sum game), a theoretically better long-term approach would be to achieve harmonious development in which both the environment and the economy benefit. To provide insights into this suggestion, we analyzed the relationships between environmental quality and economic development in China through a threshold regression model based on panel data from 292 cities from 2007 to 2018. We found that the relationship between environmental quality and economic development represented a negative interaction before or after the relationship passed through a zone of temporary balance, but that attaining a high urbanization level (in this case study, 81.0%) could improve the efficiency and capital utilization rate of environmental governance and change the impact from negative to positive, thereby achieving harmonious development rather than a zero-sum game. The government should therefore take measures to increase urbanization so as to achieve more harmonious development of the environment and economy (i.e., a win–win situation).

The Interaction Mechanism of Fiscal Pressure, Local Government Behavioral Preferences and Environmental Governance Efficiency: Evidence from the Yangtze River Delta Region of China

In environmental governance, local governments are the main actors, and their behavioral preferences between economic growth competition (EGC) and environmental regulation (ER) affect the inputs and outputs of environmental governance. Most studies discuss the relationship between government behaviors and the environment from the fiscal decentralization perspective, with few studies from the fiscal pressure (FP) perspective. Importantly, the bidirectional interaction mechanism is easily ignored. This study measured local government FP, EGC, ER, and environmental governance efficiency (EGE) in China's Yangtze River Delta (YRD) region from 2000 to 2020. Moran's I index was used to identify the change characteristics of local government behavioral preferences. The interaction mechanism was analyzed by a panel vector autoregression (PVAR) model. The results show that (1) from 2000 to 2020, FP was generally strengthened. EGE generally showed fluctuating and rising change characteristics, with more obvious fluctuating and rising characteristics before 2012 and after 2012, respectively. Local governments shifted from a strong alternative preference to a weak synergistic preference. (2) FP had a self-reinforcing effect. EGC and ER had a self-weakening effect. EGE had not only a self-weakening effect but also a weak self-dependence. (3) There is a double negative interaction mechanism between FP and local government behavioral preferences. FP made local governments prefer to reduce EGC and relax ER, but in fact, EGC and ER were conducive to alleviating FP. (4) There is a negative transitive influence mechanism between FP, local government behavioral preferences and EGE. The negative effect of FP on EGE can be transmitted by reducing EGC and ER. This paper provides a scientific basis for improving EGE in the YRD region and understanding the behavioral logic of local governments' environmental governance and a reference for other rapidly industrializing and urbanizing regions.

Favorable Fiscal Self-Sufficiency Enables Local Governments to Better Improve the Environmental Governance—Evidence from China’s Lower-Pollution Areas

With the rapid development of industrial economy, local governments in China have invested a large amount of financial funds in environmental protection. In the era of widespread use of clean energy, local governments have a greater responsibility to coordinate fiscal policies with industrial development policies to improve regional environment. Local governments with large fiscal surpluses would make more efforts to improve environmental efficiency, rather than attract heavily polluting industrial enterprises to develop their local economies, and more likely to promote the use of clean energy equipment and raise environmental awareness in government. This paper focuses on testing the impact of abundant fiscal revenue of local governments on the efficiency of regional environmental governance with the data in all prefecture-level cities of China’s Guangdong province from 2001 to 2020. We estimate local environmental governance efficiency score with super-efficiency SBM method, taking unexpected output into account. Then we find that fiscal affluence has significant positive effect on the efficiency of environmental governance and the environmental awareness of the government also has obvious help in improving local environmental efficiency. We hope that these findings will provide practical help for local governments to improve their fiscal policy agendas and the quality of environmental governance.

How multiple interactions between policy instruments and the policy environment affect environmental governance efficiency

Few studies explored the interaction effect between policy instruments and the policy environment on environmental governance. Based on policy instrument theory, this paper conducts fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to explore the combined effect of policy instruments and the policy environment on the environmental governance efficiency of local governance. This study found four effective configurations of local government environmental governance, which can be summarized as the mandatory mode and the cooperative mode, and three inefficient configurations that can be summarized as the out-of-control mode. The results show that the regions adopting the mandatory mode are economically underdeveloped, while the regions using the cooperative mode are developed. Besides, local government competition leads to the softening of policy instruments, while government-enterprise collusion exacerbates the failure of environmental policy instruments. This paper summarizes the effective modes and reveals the reasons for the low efficiency of local government environmental governance in China. The conclusions provide not only empirical evidence for the study of policy instrument theory but also beneficial insights for the selection of environmental policy instruments and environmental governance practice.

Research on China's Environmental Governance Mode: Quality Driven or Quantity Driven?

High-quality environmental governance (EG) is closely related to its governance mode. Nevertheless, few studies have examined the EG modes from the dual perspectives of quality and quantity. This article utilizes panel data of 30 Chinese provinces from 2003 to 2020 to research the influence of environmental governance efficiency (EGE) and investment (EGI) on EG through a fixed-effect mode. The outcomes show that China’s EG is driven mainly by quantitative EGI. EGE and EGI show significant geographic regions, economic development levels, resource endowments, and stage heterogeneity to EG. In light of these conclusions, this article argues that the future needs to reasonably allocate EGI based on consideration of the heterogeneity of geographical regions, economic development levels, and resource endowments to optimize EGI structure and increase EGE in each province to achieve high-quality EG.

Measurement and Optimization Strategy of Urban Environmental Governance Efficiency in Different Provinces of China

The urban environment has certain attributes of public products, and its governance activities are often led by the government. Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, China has actively promoted the coordination of resources and the environment, steadily promoted the construction of socialist ecological civilization, and sought breakthroughs in urban environmental governance methods, governance scopes, and governance concepts. Studying the level and efficiency of urban environmental governance in different regions is conducive to the realization of coordinated urban and rural development and the improvement of regional comprehensive environmental conditions. This paper uses data envelopment analysis to measure the urban environmental governance efficiency of 31 provinces in China in 2019, and quantitatively analyze and compare comprehensive technical efficiency score, pure technical efficiency score, scale efficiency score, and return to scale. It is found that (1) the urban development in various regions is unbalanced, and the efficiency of environmental governance varies greatly; (2) the overall efficiency of urban environmental governance in Jilin, Liaoning, Ningxia, and Tibet is relatively good. The pure technical efficiency score of urban environmental governance in Guangdong, Hunan, and Shandong performed relatively well; The economies of scale in Guizhou, Hainan and Qinghai are relatively obvious, and the growth level of urban environmental governance output factors is higher than that of input factors. China should refine the investment direction of environmental governance, introduce advanced environmental governance technologies, explore comprehensive governance models involving all citizens, and formulate environmental governance plans that meet the actual conditions of the city, so as to improve the efficiency of urban environmental governance, optimize the level of urban environmental governance, and realize the sustainable development of economy, resources and environment.

Long time series ozone prediction in China: A novel dynamic spatiotemporal deep learning approach

Ozone pollution is a global environmental problem becoming increasingly prominent in China. It is of great significance to achieve long-term and high-precision ground-level ozone prediction on large scales to improve the efficiency of environmental governance. In this paper, we developed a dynamic graph convolutional and sequence to sequence embedded with the attention mechanism model (DG-ASeqseq) for predicting daily maximum 8-h average ozone (MDA8 O3) concentrations over China the next seven days. In the proposed approach, changeable spatial correlations are modelled by graph convolutional operations on dynamic graphs constructed based on multiple information of historical change, and temporal correlations in long time series are modelled through the sequence to sequence networks embedded with the attention mechanism. Results show the reliability and effectiveness of the proposed model, and it is superior to other benchmark models in simulating long-term spatiotemporal variations of O3 concentrations in large scale areas. Moreover, the proposed model has good prediction capability in severe O3 pollution events. Advancement in this methodology could provide guidance for the government's coordinated control of regional pollution to help improve air quality and jointly safeguard global climate security.

The Temporal and Spatial Distributions and Influencing Factors of Transboundary Pollution in China.

Transboundary pollution between neighboring regions seriously affects the efficiency of overall environmental governance; however, there are few studies focused on how to estimate the degree of transboundary pollution between different regions. With China as a case study, this article developed a new measurement to estimate the degree of transboundary pollution among regions, and comprehensively investigated the influencing factors of transboundary pollution in China between 2000 and 2013. The results indicate that transboundary pollution effects exist in China. In ascending order, the regions most affected overall by transboundary pollution from polluting enterprises were as follows: eastern region < central region < western region. The reduction in transboundary pollution effects was most prominent for severely polluting enterprises in the eastern and western regions and lightly polluting enterprises in the central region. An analysis of the influencing factors reveals that the regional environmental regulation intensity has a negative feedback effect on the transboundary pollution effects. These findings indicate that polluting enterprises in regions with a low environmental regulation intensity are more inclined to operate in border areas to obtain both the environmental benefits associated with the low local environmental regulation intensity and the market economy benefits associated with neighboring urban regions, thereby aggravating environmental pollution in border areas.

Investigate the Effects of Industrial Agglomeration on Nitrogen Dioxide Pollution Using Spatial Panel Durbin and Panel Threshold Models

The degree of industrial agglomeration in China has contributed to the reduction of nitrogen dioxide pollution because of financial support, the allocation of environmental governance efficiency, and technological advantages. However, the intensity and scope of the spatial effect of this contribution needs to be studied in depth. Based on the influence mechanism and intermediate mechanism of the spatial pattern, this paper uses the panel data of 282 prefecture-level and above cities in China from 2015 to 2018, draws on the STIRPAT model, and uses the Spatial Panel Durbin and Panel Threshold models to investigate the effects of industrial agglomeration on nitrogen dioxide. The study finds that 1) industrial agglomeration has a significant spatial spillover effect on the reduction of nitrogen dioxide pollution, and the increase in the level of local industrial agglomeration can greatly reduce the concentration of nitrogen dioxide in the surrounding area. 2) This kind of spatial overflow has a threshold boundary. Within 100 km, it is a dense area of overflow and reaches the threshold boundary beyond 150 km. 3) Under the influence of the three intermediate mechanisms of industrial agglomeration, the increase in car ownership, and the level of economic development, the impact of industrial agglomeration on the reduction of nitrogen dioxide pollution has gradually increased. The above conclusion is still valid after various robustness tests.