The effect of environmental centralisation on productivity: Evidence from an administrative reform in China

Abstract

This paper adopts a novel institutional perspective—environmental centralisation—to examine its impact on firm productivity in developing countries. In 2008, China's State Environmental Protection Administration was upgraded to the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP). This administrative reform strengthened the central government's ability to protect the environment, enabling it to address more environmental affairs and concentrate on environmental rights. Based on the quasi-natural experiment of the establishment of the MEP, this study takes a new perspective on the impact of environmental centralisation on productivity. The difference-in-difference-in-difference approach is used for the first time to estimate the impact of environmental centralisation on productivity. We find that environmental centralisation caused by the establishment of the MEP significantly increased the productivity of heavily polluting companies, and a series of robustness tests confirm that the results are credible. We identify three possible mechanisms, namely, facilitating innovation, curbing rent-seeking behaviour and inhibiting over-investments. The policy implication of this study is that the effectiveness of environmental policy depends not only on the policy itself but also on the allocation of environmental rights among different levels of government.