Economic Growth, Urban Governance, and Environment Protection

ABSTRACT

We empirically examine the impact of economic growth on air pollution and the regulating effect of urban governance. The results show that there is an inverse “U” relationship between economic growth (GDP) and regional sulfur dioxide(SO₂) emissions, and urban governance have a weak regulating effect. Further research has found that extensive growth at the expense of the environment can cause an increase in the profitability of regional enterprises, which is more obvious in state-owned and state-controlled enterprises. In this paper, we embed urban governance into the analytical framework, enriching the research literature on environmental governance, and providing empirical evidence for relevant policy setting.

KEYWORDS:

• Economic growth
• air pollution
• urban governance

Notes

1. China’s current administrative divisions are as follows: first level provincial administrative regions: including provinces, autonomous regions, municipalities directly under the central government and special administrative regions. Second level prefecture level administrative region: including prefecture level city, region, autonomous prefecture and League. Three level county-level administrative regions: including municipal districts, county-level cities, counties, autonomous counties, banners, autonomous banners, special zones and forest areas. Four level township level administrative regions: including streets, towns, townships, ethnic townships, Sumu, ethnic Sumu, and county districts. Considering the availability of data, this paper takes the secondary prefecture level administrative region as the research object.

2. Since the implementation of the new environmental protection law in 2015, exogenous policy impact may affect the conclusion of this paper, so we decide to end the sample period before 2015.

3. A first-order difference for the five indicators: ‘people’s life,’ ‘education,’ ‘health care,’ “infrastructure,’and ‘social welfare’ to obtain the year-on-year increase in value. All observation indicators are standardized to obtain the integrated value of the input and output variables.

4. Both independent variables(Ability) and dependent variables(SO2) involve the information of environment effect, it is easy to form a mechanical correlation, and it is more difficult to explain the relationship between ability and environment.Urban governance plays an important role in urban environmental quality. This is because urban governance is a tradition and system that can be used in a region. As an important basic system, it has the right to force people to obey the formal system and rules, It also includes all kinds of informal institutional arrangements that people agree or think are in line with their interests, which can restrict the behavior of actors, including the awareness of environmental protection and environmental governance behavior.

5. China is rich in materials and has uneven development. In order to investigate the robustness of the conclusion, this paper divides the administrative region of China into three regions: the East, the central and the West. The eastern region includes Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, Liaoning, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian, Shandong 11 provinces (cities) including Guangdong and Hainan; The central region includes 10 provinces (regions) including Shanxi, Inner Mongolia, Jilin, Heilongjiang, Anhui, Jiangxi, Henan, Hubei, Hunan and Guangxi; The western region includes nine provinces (regions) including Sichuan, Guizhou, Yunnan, Tibet, Shaanxi, Gansu, Qinghai, Ningxia and Xinjiang.It is interesting to see if the main test results exist in three regions at the same time to verify the robustness of the conclusion.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Key Soft Science Project of the Science and Technology Department of Zhejiang Province [No. 2020C25014]; National Natural Science Foundation of China [71702102].