Auditing the environmental accountability of local officials and the corporate green response: evidence from China

ABSTRACT

Auditing the natural-resource asset accountability of local officials is an institutional innovation that China used to transform its mode of economic development from that of an ‘industrial civilization’ to an ‘ecological civilization’. This study investigated the effect of changes in the assessment of local officials for promotion (i.e. including environmental protection in the assessment, along with economic performance) on the green response of enterprises. To this end, a nationwide pilot project (2015–2017) involving the auditing of natural-resource assets for local officials was used as a quasi-experiment. The results indicated that the green response level of the treatment (audit pilot) group was significantly higher than that of the control group. This indicated that the system for auditing the natural-resource assets for local officials had environmental governance effects. According to a mediation analysis, both governmental subsidies and bank credit mediated the effect of auditing on green response of enterprises. This indicates that during the pilot audits of natural-resource assets, high-polluting enterprises mainly met the requirements of the government and banks for a green response to obtain economic support. This study provides empirical evidence for evaluating policy effects and strengthening the audits of local officials’ environmental accountability.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental accountability audit
• environmental information disclosure
• local official
• political performance view transformation
• sustainable development

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• D21
• H83
• M14
• M42

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ The document is issued by the general office of the CPC Central Committee and the general office of the State Council.

² Model (1) controls the fixed effects of both individual and year. Thus, we only needed to directly observe the DT of the interaction between Treat and Post to avoid the influence of multicollinearity.

Additional information

Funding

This paper is supported by National Office for Philosophy and Social Sciences of China, and it is the stage achievement of the Key Project of ‘The Policy Effect and Policy Optimization of Leading Cadres’ Audits of Natural Resources Assets’ [21AZD061].