Impact of Environmental Decentralization on Regional Green Development

Abstract

Having a reasonable environmental management system is key to achieve regional green development. This article integrates environmental decentralization into an environmental/economic analytical framework, introducing a fiscal decentralization indicator to explore the mechanism of environmental decentralization and regional green development, and then tests this concept using Chinese provincial penal data. The results show that the spillover effect of green development is significant: Improving regional green development will promote green development in neighboring regions. At the national level, different categories of environmental decentralization have different effects, and these can also affect green development through both direct and indirect paths. There is also a positive interaction mechanism between these two variables. Moreover, the interaction between environmental and fiscal decentralization has a negative effect on regional green development, with the impact varying across regions. These findings play an important role in green development, industrial transformation, and advancement, especially in China.

What drives green development in China: public pressure or the willingness of local government?

“…Second, the transition period of green development is long, and the effect has not been fully demonstrated. Green development is the second generation of sustainable development concept (Cao et al 2019 ; Zou et al 2019 ), which not only takes environmental protection as an important content but also takes the “green” and “ecological” of the process and results as the way and requirement in economic activities; it can reflect the transformation effect of the development mode. The transformation of economic development mode is a long-term process, especially the concentrated emission of pollutants caused by China’s “squeeze” industrialization (Xiao et al 2020 ), which increases the difficulty of green development transformation.…”

Does Environmental Decentralization Improve Regional Green Innovation? Evidence from China

“…In addition to environmental management of levels, environmental management of affairs mainly includes environmental administrative, environmental monitoring and environmental supervision . As Zou et al (2019)…”

Impact of China's Environmental Decentralization on Carbon Emissions From Energy Consumption: An Empirical Study Based on the Dynamic Spatial Econometric Model

“…From the perspective of fiscal decentralization and haze management, Li and Han (2015) have confirmed that decentralization has a favorable effect on environmental quality improvement. The reason for this is that, first of all, the regional heterogeneity in environmental pollution and demand for environmental public goods gives local governments a greater information advantage (local governments are closer to the public and have a better understanding of the real state of the environment and the environmental preferences of residents in their jurisdictions) than the central government in the provision of public goods, thus enabling local governments to provide better environmental governance services to residents in an efficient and low-cost manner (Zou et al 2019;Lu et al 2019;Banzhaf et al 2012). If environmental centralization is adopted, heterogeneity between regions will be ignored and public services provided by the central government will struggle to meet real local needs.…”

“…Since fiscal decentralization is the basis of environmental decentralization and there is interaction between the two, fiscal decentralization is also taken as the core explanatory variable affecting carbon emissions. Based on the availability of data, this paper adopted the fiscal autonomy index to characterize the fiscal decentralization of each province with reference to the research method of Zou (2019) to compensate for the inability of the existing index to reflect the differences in the degree of fiscal decentralization among local governments. The specific formula is = ⁄ , in which indicates the degree of fiscal decentralization in local governments, and and are the fiscal expenditures in the provincial budgets and fiscal revenues in the regional budgets respectively.…”