Get the real boss in position: Examining the environmental effect of ‘shared environmental accountability’ in China

IF 14.2 2区经济学 Q1 ECONOMICS Energy Economics Pub Date : 2025-01-01 Epub Date: 2024-11-26 DOI:10.1016/j.eneco.2024.108083

Yue Li , Haowei Yu , Peng Zhang

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Abstract

China implemented the Shared Environmental Accountability between Party Secretaries and Government Officials (SEA) policy in August 2015, aiming to enhance environmental enforcement by holding both the secretaries of the Communist Party of China (Party secretaries) and government officials accountable for environmental issues. This paper examines the environmental effect of the SEA policy, with a particular focus on the role of bureaucrats' personal traits. Based on city-level data from 2011 to 2021, we find that the SEA policy leads to a differential reduction in industrial SO₂ emissions and energy consumption by approximately 15.9 % and 32.0 % in cities that have a higher pressure of environmental protection. We also find that the pro-environmental effect of the SEA policy is mainly realized by enhancing energy efficiency and cleaner production. More importantly, we find that the environmental effect of the SEA policy is strengthened by hometown ties if Party secretaries have promotion prospects. Further improvements in emission reduction and energy saving could be achieved if certain countermeasures were undertaken so that Party secretaries, regardless of their promotion potential, are incentivized to faithfully implement environmental regulations.

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让真正的老板就位：考察中国“共同环境责任”的环境效应

中国于2015年8月实施了党委书记和政府官员环境责任共享（SEA）政策，旨在通过要求中国共产党书记和政府官员对环境问题负责来加强环境执法。本文考察了环评政策的环境影响，特别关注了官员个人特质的作用。基于2011 - 2021年的城市数据，我们发现在环境保护压力较大的城市，SEA政策导致工业SO2排放量和能源消耗的差异减少约15.9%和32.0%。我们还发现，环评政策的亲环境效应主要通过提高能源效率和清洁生产来实现。更重要的是，我们发现，如果党委书记有晋升前景，那么乡亲关系会加强环评政策的环境效应。如果采取一定的对策，使党委书记，不管他们的晋升潜力如何，都能被激励忠实地执行环境法规，那么在减排和节能方面的进一步改善是可以实现的。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Energy Economics ECONOMICS-

CiteScore

18.60

自引率

12.50%

发文量

524

期刊介绍： Energy Economics is a field journal that focuses on energy economics and energy finance. It covers various themes including the exploitation, conversion, and use of energy, markets for energy commodities and derivatives, regulation and taxation, forecasting, environment and climate, international trade, development, and monetary policy. The journal welcomes contributions that utilize diverse methods such as experiments, surveys, econometrics, decomposition, simulation models, equilibrium models, optimization models, and analytical models. It publishes a combination of papers employing different methods to explore a wide range of topics. The journal's replication policy encourages the submission of replication studies, wherein researchers reproduce and extend the key results of original studies while explaining any differences. Energy Economics is indexed and abstracted in several databases including Environmental Abstracts, Fuel and Energy Abstracts, Social Sciences Citation Index, GEOBASE, Social & Behavioral Sciences, Journal of Economic Literature, INSPEC, and more.