Research on Financial Pressure, Poverty Governance, and Environmental Pollution in China

Abstract

The traditional environmental governance theory attributes pollution to the result of market failure, but ignores the institution-level factors and the possibility of government failure. Using provincial panel data from 2001 to 2016 in China, and by drawing impulse response function graphs and building PVAR models, this paper studies the financial pressure and poor governance effect on environmental pollution. Financial pressure represents fiscal decentralization and debt pressure. The study finds that the increase of fiscal autonomy brings about the reduction of various types of pollutant emissions; the expansion of the scale of government debt causes very large pressure on the local governments to repay their debts and exacerbates environmental pollution in order to obtain debt repayment funds. For a long time, there was indeed a phenomenon in China in which the goal of reducing poverty was achieved at the cost of the environment. However, since 2012, the reduction of the poverty-stricken population has brought about a good trend of reducing emissions of various types of pollutants. There are no "PPE vicious circles" and "environmental traps" in China. There has been no contradiction between poverty reduction and the green development strategy implementation since 2012. There is a win-win trend in the process of environmental protection and poverty governance in China.

Assessment of the Impact of Social Responsibility on Poverty

“…Regarding the different amount of investments every business unit puts into equipment updates and the application of new technologies, and taking into account the fact that they may be used to solve specific environmental problems [109,110], the last investments were assessed by taking into account the field of environmental activities. It should be noted, as well, that the importance of investments, and their impact on poverty rates, may be assessed by taking into account the pollution rate changes that are affected by investments [111]; therefore, the research is conducted including air, water, etc., pollution rates caused by the business units operating in the production sector.…”

Fiscal Decentralization, Pollution and China’s Tourism Revenue

“…Zhang and Zhao [9] suggested that decentralization might help the control of environmental pollution. First, the level of environmental pollution varies significantly across different regions of a country, and it is difficult for a central government to provide environmental public goods for regions of different environmental conditions.…”

The entrepreneurial ecosystem of inclusive finance and entrepreneurship: A theoretical and empirical test in China

“…Besides, the PVAR is estimated by a GMM estimation (Abrigo & Love, 2016;Liu & Kim, 2018). To analyze a PVAR model, IRF and variance decomposition function (VD) are applied due to their wide acceptance (Galariotis et al, 2018;Z. Zhang & Zhao, 2018).…”