More incentive, less pollution: The influence of official appraisal system reform on environmental enforcement

Three essays on agri-environmental policy and hazardous materials

“…Moreover, few studies, except, incorporate incentive mechanisms like performance targets into the Tullock model. Our paper, which builds a multi-activity model with a target as an incentive mechanism, extends the literature on the multiple-activity Tullock competition.Second, from the perspective of performance-based promotion tournaments, this paper provides theoretical support to the previous literature, in that: (a) it helps to explain the empirical findings such asCheng et al (2022) and, which examine the existence of environmental protection behaviors and the corresponding heterogeneous responses; and , (b) it supports the empirical findings in the literature, includingGuan et al (2022),Wang et al (2020),Wang et al (2021),Wang (2021) and, which find changes in devotion to environmental protection efforts due to official evaluation system reform. One paper written byCao et al (2021) is closely related to our model, which build a theoretical model to answer how local Chinese officials respond strategically to minimum air quality control targets when they care more about pursuing regional economic development.…”

Hidden Dimensions of Injustice in the Green Transition of China’s Coal Mining Industry

“…China's approach to environmental and energy governance has been termed "authoritarian environmentalism," a multi-tier command-style campaign of energy with top-down delegation of tasks (G. Chen & Lees, 2018). With the environment integrated into the performance appraisal system (Guan et al, 2022), local government officials felt obliged to reduce coal production capacity as instructed by the central government edict, constraining enterprises to act accordingly. Large state-owned coal mining companies, S Company, for example, exhibited greater resilience than smaller private enterprises and were able to protect employees to some extent through redeployment ("internal resettlement").…”

Do environmental target constraints promote corporate pollution reduction?

“…Greenstone et al (2021) found that concentrations of major air pollutants in China declined significantly after peaking in 2013. Guan et al (2022) found that during China's 11th Five-Year Plan, goal-based performance appraisal systems effectively strengthened local environmental governance. Scholars have also studied the impact of a specific environmental policy on corporate pollutant emissions, including two-control zone policy and smart city construction policy (Tanaka 2015, Chen et al 2018a).…”