Does Environmental Inspection Led by the Central Government Improve the Air Quality in China? The Moderating Role of Public Engagement

Abstract

The severe air pollution in China has imperiled public health and resulted in substantial economic loss. To tackle the unprecedented pollution challenges, China has launched a campaign-based environmental inspection over all regions to impel local governments’ actual pollution abatement. At the same time, with the public’s awakening awareness about environmental protection, the public has also played a particularly vital role in this inspection. Under this circumstance, the study tries to reveal the impact of Environmental Inspection led by the Central Government (EICG) on air quality improvement, and to examine the role of public engagement in their relationship. Specifically, utilizing daily data covering 249 prefecture-level cities in China from 1 June 2015 to 31 May 2018, this study employed multiple regression models and then found that due to the implementation of EICG, the concentrations of PM2.5, PM10, SO2 and NO2 decline by 2.642 μg/m3, 6.088 μg/m3, 1.357 μg/m3 and 1.443 μg/m3, respectively, and the air quality index decreases by 2.4 in total, which implies that EICG can improve the air quality to a great extent. However, the coefficients for major variables change from negative to positive, suggesting that an attenuation effect of EICG on air quality improvement exists in Chinese institutional background. Meanwhile, public engagement is shown to enhance the positive association between EICG and air quality improvement. Additionally, further analysis demonstrates that EICG promotes the improvement in air quality up to three months after the inspection in cities during the heating period, while the positive effect has existed during one month before the inspection in cities during the non-heating period. Additionally, in contrast to the instant effect in cities not specially monitored, there is a lagged effect of EICG in controlling the air pollution in cities specially monitored.

Optimal Administrative Response to Selfish Behaviors in Urban Public Management: The Role of Zero-Determinant Strategies

“…where a sufficiently small θ ≥ 0 is a free parameter to ensure the probability stay within the range of 0 ≤ q 1 ji ≤ 1. Equation (25) shows that, irrespective of how speculators evade regulation, the administrator can obtain a higher expected payoff by setting the probability of the mixed strategy s Y (1) to the holding of equation (26).…”

“…erefore, this perspective, which is known as the policy network perspective, emphasizes the importance of modeling interactions between different actors [23]. e relevant empirical research shows that the participation of the residents of a city exerts a positive impact on urban public environmental policy implementation [24][25][26].…”

“…In order to illustrate how the administrator enforces the ZD strategy and provide supportive evidence for the theoretical predictions of the model, we specifically suppose that the administrator Y has three strategies available with k � 3 and use numerical examples to fix the specific forms of the function r 1 (k) and r 2 (k). By doing this, we can get analytical results of the equations ( 23)- (26). Let the functions r 1 (k) and r 2 (k) in the payoff matrix take the following form:…”

Benefits and costs of campaign-style environmental implementation: evidence from China’s central environmental protection inspection system

“…CEPI is a comprehensive environmental governance policy, and its effects are not only in water quality but also in air and soil, etc. Several studies have also empirically examined the performance of CEPI on air pollution control (Jia and Chen, 2019;Xu et al, 2020). But given that this paper focuses on the water pollution aspect, it does not include other aspects of environmental performance, such as air and soil, in our results.…”

“…Under CEPI, the central government sends inspection teams led by ministry-level cadres into various provinces to check whether local governments implement environmental protection policies and some prominent environmental issues. It then requires local governments to fulfill their enforcement responsibilities (Xu et al, 2020). Every province will receive a CEPI feedback list after completing the inspection, covering all major environmental problems in the water, air, soil, and other environmental issues.…”