The Impact of Government Official Assessment on Ecological Poverty Alleviation: Evidence from Chinese Listed Companies

Abstract

Ecological poverty alleviation launched by the Chinese government is an innovative green development measure that combines targeted poverty alleviation with ecological protection to realize the ecological environmental protection and income growth of the impoverished population. Based on the Chinese government’s policy of poverty alleviation assessment for provincial government officials in 2016, this paper studies whether the assessment of government officials promote enterprises’ participation in ecological poverty alleviation. Using the sample of Chinese A-share listed companies from 2016 to 2020, the empirical test shows that the more important the assessment of poverty alleviation by officials, the more likely local enterprises are to participate in targeted poverty alleviation and the higher the investment level is likely to be. The results pass a series of robustness tests. In addition, this paper further finds that enterprise participation in ecological poverty alleviation can effectively reduce local water pollution, air pollution and solid pollution, thus improving the ecological environment. It suggests that the assessment mechanism of Chinese government officials can effectively promote multi-dimensional ecological poverty alleviation. The contributions of this paper are as follows. Firstly, it is helpful to expand the relevant literature on enterprise environmental protection from the perspective of ecological poverty alleviation. Secondly, it is helpful to expand the literature related to government–enterprise interaction from the perspective of the assessment of government officials. Finally, it is helpful to enrich and expand the relevant literatures on promotion incentives of government officials from the perspective of ecological poverty alleviation.

Does China’s poverty alleviation policy improve the quality of the ecological environment in poverty-stricken areas?

“…In fact, with the increasingly prominent contradiction between economic development and environmental protection, the evaluation mechanism of government officials based on GDP assessment is being reversed, and environmental performance is gradually becoming an important element of officials' performance assessment (Jia et al, 2014;Piotroski and Zhang, 2014), therefore, according to the promotion tournament theory, the policy of poverty alleviation will also certainly influence the governance behavior of local officials, which in turn will have an impact on local economic and social development. Therefore, the current impact of environmental regulation on regional ecological environment is mainly manifested as a push back effect (Huang, 2022). For the sustainable development of poor regions, the poverty alleviation policy has strengthened regional environmental regulation by quantifying factors such as changes in ecological environment and increasing environmental expenditure.…”

“…In the current context, quantifying the conflict between poverty alleviation and ecological protection is nothing less than an emerging area of concern (Li R. Q et al, 2021). Unlike the poverty eradication policies implemented in other countries, China's poverty eradication policy emphasizes the relationship between ecological environmental protection and socioeconomic development in the process of poverty eradication, and further clarifies the principles of poverty alleviation policies, requiring ecological protection as the main focus, not at the expense of ecology, and exploring new ways of ecological poverty alleviation to develop the economy and get rid of poverty (Huang, 2022). Although China has successfully established a developmental approach to poverty alleviation with Chinese characteristics and achieved total poverty eradication, the impact of this policy on the ecological environment in poor areas has been generally overlooked (Zhang and Feng, 2020).…”