Get the real boss in position: Examining the environmental effect of ‘shared environmental accountability’ in China

IF 13.6 2区经济学 Q1 ECONOMICS

Energy Economics Pub Date : 2024-11-26 DOI:10.1016/j.eneco.2024.108083

Yue Li , Haowei Yu , Peng Zhang

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

China implemented the Shared Environmental Accountability between Party Secretaries and Government Officials (SEA) policy in August 2015, aiming to enhance environmental enforcement by holding both the secretaries of the Communist Party of China (Party secretaries) and government officials accountable for environmental issues. This paper examines the environmental effect of the SEA policy, with a particular focus on the role of bureaucrats' personal traits. Based on city-level data from 2011 to 2021, we find that the SEA policy leads to a differential reduction in industrial SO₂ emissions and energy consumption by approximately 15.9 % and 32.0 % in cities that have a higher pressure of environmental protection. We also find that the pro-environmental effect of the SEA policy is mainly realized by enhancing energy efficiency and cleaner production. More importantly, we find that the environmental effect of the SEA policy is strengthened by hometown ties if Party secretaries have promotion prospects. Further improvements in emission reduction and energy saving could be achieved if certain countermeasures were undertaken so that Party secretaries, regardless of their promotion potential, are incentivized to faithfully implement environmental regulations.

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来源期刊

Energy Economics ECONOMICS-

CiteScore

18.60

自引率

12.50%

发文量

524

期刊介绍： Energy Economics is a field journal that focuses on energy economics and energy finance. It covers various themes including the exploitation, conversion, and use of energy, markets for energy commodities and derivatives, regulation and taxation, forecasting, environment and climate, international trade, development, and monetary policy. The journal welcomes contributions that utilize diverse methods such as experiments, surveys, econometrics, decomposition, simulation models, equilibrium models, optimization models, and analytical models. It publishes a combination of papers employing different methods to explore a wide range of topics. The journal's replication policy encourages the submission of replication studies, wherein researchers reproduce and extend the key results of original studies while explaining any differences. Energy Economics is indexed and abstracted in several databases including Environmental Abstracts, Fuel and Energy Abstracts, Social Sciences Citation Index, GEOBASE, Social & Behavioral Sciences, Journal of Economic Literature, INSPEC, and more.