省直管县改革与区域空气污染——来自卫星反演数据的实证证据

从政府治理结构改革的角度探讨如何推进环境污染治理是一种有益的尝试。从理论上来说,省直管县改革作为一种重要的政府治理结构改革,能够通过简化政府治理级次来改变政府治理效率,影响诸如环保等公共产品和服务的供给。本文采用卫星反演的PM2.5数据检验了省直管县改革前后县级区域空气污染的变动趋势。发现“财政省直管县”改革能显著降低地区空气污染水平,“强县扩权”改革则显著加剧了地区空气污染。稳健性检验、进一步的分析结果均支持上述结论。机制检验发现,“财政省直管县”主要体现为财力保障水平提升导致的治理变化,而“强县扩权”则主要体现为地方政府竞争行为改变导致的空气污染治理变化。总之,单纯的政府级次减少可能并不必然利于地方公共服务的提供,良好的财力保障为地方污染治理服务提供了支撑,竞争行为变化带来的改革效应则会受到政府对环境污染重视程度的显著影响。

Province Managing County Reform and Regional Air Pollution: Empirical Evidence from Satellite Inversion Data

The effect of air pollution on people's lives is becoming more and more serious. Haze pollution caused by PM2.5 damages the human respiratory and cardiovascular systems and increases the risk of disease. Therefore, it is important to improve governance efficiency to increase local air pollution control. In China, the “Province Managing County” and “Strong County Expansion” are important government reforms. Exploring whether they can improve the governance structure and promote air pollution control is important both theoretically and practically.The Province Managing County and Strong County Expansion reforms were designed to optimize the structure of the government by simplifying its levels. Theoretically, as an important public service, air pollution control is also affected by these reforms. On the one hand, the improvement in regional financial capacity brought by the reforms can help local governments improve air pollution control. On the other hand, the intensified competition caused by the reforms could lead local governments to pay more attention to higher-level assessments and reduce their investment in air pollution control. That is, the improvement in financial resources might promote regional air pollution control, while the resulting intensified competition might negatively affect regional air pollution control.To verify whether air pollution control is consistent with these theories, this paper examines the changes in the regional air pollution situation before and after the reforms using satellite inversion data to analyze the relationship between governance reform and local air pollution control. The results show that the Strong County Expansion significantly worsened local PM2.5 concentrations, whereas the Province Managing County reform significantly suppressed them. The exploration of the mechanisms of influence shows that the reform of Province Managing County is mainly reflected in the changes in air pollution control caused by the improvement of financial capacity, while the Strong County Expansion reform is mainly reflected in changes in air pollution control caused by changes in local government competition. Further analysis shows that the more local governments attach importance to environmental pollution control, the more the reforms are conducive to the improvement of regional air quality.The main contributions of this paper are as follows: First, this paper uses satellite data instead of ground observation data. Satellite data provide a large sample size and a long coverage period, which solves the problem of the lack of PM2.5 data for most areas in China before 2012. Second, compared with the data used in the literature, this paper effectively avoids the problems of tampering and fabricating common with ground monitoring data. Third, based on the literature, research on environmental protection governance under these reforms is still limited. To enrich research related to the reforms, this paper uses relatively comprehensive data to analyze and discuss this topic, and conducts a preliminary analysis of regional pollution control problems after decentralization.The research conclusions show that for environmental pollution prevention, decentralization is not a once-and-for-all strategy. The improvement of regional financial capacity is more important. Matching power and financial resources is a necessary condition for perfecting the public service supply. Whether the reforms can promote the treatment of regional air pollution also depends on the importance of a region to air pollution. From the perspective of government governance, county-level governments may not have the incentives or ability to adequately address air pollution control, as it is a public service with spatial spillover. The intervention and coordination of the superior government can solve this problem. However, after decentralization, local governments' blind expansion of productive expenditures to compete for economic growth has seriously hindered environmental pollution control. Reducing pure economic growth in assessments and including environmental protection indicators, such as the implementation of green GDP, might alleviate this problem.