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The scatter plot of promotion pressure on local officials and regional carbon emissions during 2010–2016
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This paper constructs data from 30 provinces in mainland China from 1997 to 2016 and mainly adopts panel data fixed effects models to investigate how the promotion pressure on local officials affects regional carbon emissions. Our empirical results show that the relationship between the promotion pressure on local officials and regional carbon emis...
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Citations
... 2. Decision-Making in Non-First-Tier Cities Based on the configurations from Schemes 4,5,8,9,10, and 11, non-first-tier cities demonstrate a complex landscape in making forward-looking decisions. These cities often exhibit a lower consistency and coverage in forward-looking decision-making compared to their non-forward-looking counterparts, indicative of the significant constraints they face. ...
In urban centers across China, the actual annual land supply frequently fails to meet government projections, significantly impacting local economic and social development. This study bridges the gap in prospective analyses of governmental decision-making concerning urban housing land supply. Employing fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis, this research examines the housing land supply in 50 Chinese cities, including 16 first-tier and 34 non-first-tier cities. The goal is to explore the decision-making combinations that influence the supply of housing land, thereby aiding in the formulation of governmental policies. Our findings indicate that in first-tier cities, forward-looking decisions rely on low fiscal pressure, with purchase restrictions and land supply restructuring acting in tandem. In contrast, in non-first-tier cities, high population density or significant fiscal pressure necessitate enhancements in land supply structures without implementing purchase restrictions to sustain forward-looking governance. Additionally, while forward-looking decisions depend on numerous conditions, it is generally simpler to circumvent non-forward-looking decisions. This investigation integrates forward-looking theory into real estate research, offering valuable insights for the formulation of governmental land supply strategies.
... Local officials adopted various strategies to stimulate growth, as empirically demonstrated across studies. For example, they competitively offer preferential policies to attract domestic and foreign investment, such as low-price land, low-cost labor, low-requirement environmental protection, and tax breaks (Chen et al., 2022). They tend to invest in strategic infrastructure projects at critical ages for career advancement, such as 54 for mayors, which can directly contribute to growth and employment figures (Zhang and Gao, 2007). ...
Despite close associations, political science had weak explanatory power for fertility transition. It often depicts the political processes of fertility transition as direct and coercive policies and mechanical execution without consideration of indirect bureaucratic processes. Drawing on principal-agent and economic-driven theories, this study established a novel model using 1980–2000 Chinese provincial panel data: local officials facilitated fertility decline through economic development for career advancement. System generalized method moments (GMM) and ordered logistic regression (OLM) results showed: (1) gross domestic product (GDP) per capita growth (OR = 0.012) and total fertility rate (TFR) decline (OR = 0.026) increased promotion odds, while excessive TFR decline (over 37% within one term) decreased it; (2) the critical age (59) and tenure year (one year before leaving office) positively associated with GDP per capita, industrialization, and lower TFR; (3) GDP per capita and industrialization negatively associated with TFR. Facilitating fertility decline via economic development was an efficient, low-risk strategy for local officials compared to radical birth control campaigns. It was the first study applying principal-agent theory to explain how bureaucratic processes enabled fertility transitions. It combined political and economic-driven theories on fertility transition, advancing political demography and refining the social science paradigm on fertility transition.
... By measuring the carbon output in China, Ran et al., 2020 empirically found that local monitoring exacerbates the output. However, as the central government included environmental quality in the assessment criteria for local government officials and continued to strengthen environmental supervision, the environmental governance capacity of local environmental supervision was improved (Chen et al., 2022a). Zhang and Li, 2020 determined that local supervision has a supportive influence on green innovation by using the quantity of supervisors to quantify local supervision. ...
Adequate government environmental supervision is the key to promoting green innovation which is an essential driver of green development. In environmental decentralization, an analysis of the mechanism of the inherent influence of central and local supervision on green innovation may prove to be of practical importance. The paper selects data from heavily polluting enterprises in A-shares in China from 2013 to 2019 using fixed-effects models, moderating effect models, heterogeneity tests, and other research methods for analysis. These results are: 1. Both central and local supervision can significantly facilitate green innovation in heavily polluting enterprises. Local supervision has a weaker promotion effect than central supervision. 2. The two environmental supervision approaches can work synergistically. Central supervision can enhance the effect of local supervision on enterprises’ green innovation. 3. An analysis of heterogeneity indicates that the two environmental supervision approaches significantly promote eastern heavy polluters engage into green innovation. However, they do not promote it significantly for non-eastern enterprises. In addition, the same regional heterogeneity exists in the positive moderating effect of central supervision. 4. Further research finds that both types of supervision induce high-quality substantive green innovation. Central supervision can further enhance the impact of local supervision on enterprises’ substantive green innovation. The paper provides empirical data references for establishing an environmental supervision path under collaboration by governments at different levels, and offers implications for achieving green innovation and optimizing pollution emission mechanisms in heavy polluters.
... On the one hand, the Plan is designed by Chinese central government at the top level, and executed by provincial officials being the largest group in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) (Bo 1996) and the public agents of the central government (Li and Lu 2020). Under China's system of political centralization and economic decentralization (Chen et al. 2022;Xu 2011;Liu et al. 2022), Chinese local officials are deeply concerned about their political future, and the central government controls the promotion and flow of provincial officials. To encourage provincial officials to focus on green development, the central government has included environmental performance in evaluation system for officials' performance. ...
... On the other hand, whether firms comply with the current system also depends on their managers and decision makers, usually CEOs (Li and Lu 2020). The decision makers' perceptions of opportunities and threats in the environment shape firms' actions facing external institutional pressures (George et al. 2006;Chen et al. 2022). ...
Findings from prior studies regarding the relationship between national institutional pressures and corporate green innovation have been mixed. To address this gap, we consider the moderating effects of public agents (provincial officials) and private agents (corporate CEOs) to investigate corporate green innovation in response to institutional pressures. Using the method of difference-in-difference, we examine the data from 722 publicly listed Chinese firms between 2007 and 2019, a period associated with the implementation of China’s Twelfth Five-Year Plan which increase the emphasis on social indicators for national development. Our results firstly show that institutional pressures caused by Twelfth Five-Year Plan significantly facilitate polluting-firms’ green innovation relative to clean-firms, and the effect is stronger when public agents are more concerned about promotion to the central government or private agents have greater concerns for legitimacy, meanwhile not producing an a real “incentive effect” on corporate green innovation, but a “crowding-out effect” on existing innovation. Furthermore, results also suggest institutional pressures mainly induced polluting-firms’ strategic innovation behaviors, and the incentive effects of institutional pressures on polluting-firms’ green innovation are different in terms of firms’ ownership and size. Our results generate important theoretical and practical implications.
... However, rapid economic development has seriously damaged natural resources and the ecological environment. Subsequently, China has started to provide vital protection for the construction of ecological civilization by establishing strict systems and enforcing the rule of law at the national level [3]. In this context, The Third Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China proposed for the first time to conduct an exit AANR for leading cadres and build a lifelong accountability system for damage to the ecological civilization. ...
With the increasing global concern for the ecological environment and sustainable development, all countries have proposed environmental regulatory policies to improve the quality of their ecological environments. China has also proposed an environmental regulation policy: Leading an officials’ accountability audit of natural resources (AANR). As the main subject of consuming resources, the sustainability of enterprises has become a focus of all parties. The Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) metric measures corporate sustainability. As a result, companies’ ESG performance has gained the community’s attention. Based on data from Chinese A-share listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen from 2011 to 2019, this study investigates the role of AANR on the ESG performance of companies via the difference-in-differences (DID) method. This study found that implementing the AANR pilot significantly negatively impacted corporate ESG performance. This result was found to remain robust after passing parallel trend and robustness tests. Further research found that the AANR differed significantly across corporate ownership and regions in corporate ESG performance. First, pilot implementation had a more significant impact on the ESG performance of non-state enterprises. Second, the differences across regions showed that the central region had the most significant impact, followed by the western region, while the eastern region had the most negligible impact. This study will help government departments improve the AANR system and enable companies to focus on their ESG performance.
... Chinese-style fiscal decentralization determines whether local government officials can independently use part of the financial resources to support the development of a certain local field [10], but at the same time, the promotion of Chinese officials relies on the assessment of the central government and higher governments [11]. Therefore, if local government officials, as "politicians", want to win the "promotion tournament", their fiscal governance attention would have to meet the assessment indicators set by the central government [12]. If the central government cares more about short-term growth, local governments will invest financial resources in industries with higher short-term profits [13], and, conversely, local governments will have to pay more attention to the sustainability of social development [14]. ...
The impact of Chinese-style fiscal decentralization on regional energy intensity has long been disputed by the supporters of “federal environmentalism” and those who hold “race to the bottom” views. At the same time, with the transformation of China’s development mode, the Chinese government is paying increasing attention to the protection of ecological civilization and the realization of sustainable development, and the government’s attention to the ecological environment is becoming an important factor affecting regional energy intensity. Therefore, this paper takes the fiscal decentralization and ecological attention of local governments in China as the research object and analyzes their impact mechanism on regional energy intensity. Firstly, the entropy weight method was used to measure the comprehensive score of fiscal decentralization of Chinese local governments, and the text analysis method was used to obtain the ecological attention index of Chinese provincial local governments, which was sorted into panel data of 30 provinces (municipalities and autonomous regions) in mainland China from 2007 to 2019. The spatial econometric model and panel threshold model are structured as the means for analyzing the impact that fiscal decentralization and the ecological attention of local governments have, respectively, on regional energy intensity targets. We obtained the following conclusions: Chinese fiscal decentralization can significantly improve the regional energy intensity, and the fiscal decentralization of a region can significantly reduce the energy intensity in nearby regions; the enhancement of ecological attention of local governments will significantly inhibit regional energy intensity, and also has a significant inhibitory effect on the energy intensity of neighboring regions. As the threshold variable—which is the ecological attention of local governments—increases and reaches a certain level, fiscal decentralization will significantly and reversely inhibit regional energy intensity, indicating that the ecological attention of local governments can moderate the distortion of fiscal decentralization with regards to regional energy efficiency.
... Finally, some researchers have studied the effect of officials' age on environmental policy implementation and environmental pollution improvement [24][25][26]. Jin and Shen [22] use the age of local officials as a core variable to construct the utility of local officials. Wang and Xu [20] think that younger officials have better career prospects and greater motivation for promotion. ...
Background:
The COVID-19 pandemic is a public health crisis and an inspection of national governance systems and crisis response capabilities of countries globally. China has adopted a tough accountability system for officials and has succeeded in containing the spread of the pandemic. This study aimed to assess the impact of accountability on local officials' behavior in the pandemic prevention and control based on the official promotion tournament theory and utility maximization analysis framework.
Methods:
The panel data of 237 Chinese cities were extracted with local officials' characteristics, confirmed cases, Baidu migration index, Baidu search index according to city names, and data were excluded with local officials' relocation or sub-provincial cities between January 1, 2020 and May 5, 2020. Promotion gain and accountability cost were constructed by adopting promotion speed indicator, and the research hypotheses were assumed based on the utility maximization. It was the first time to apply the interaction model to empirically investigate the relationship between the promotion speed of local officials and the COVID-19 confirmed cases.
Results:
Our study showed that the promotion speed of provincial governors and mayors significantly affected the number of confirmed cases (β = - 11.615, P < 0.01). There was a significant interaction between the promotion speeds of provincial governors and mayors (β = - 2594.1, P < 0.01), indicating that they had a coordinated effect on the pandemic control. Additionally, mayors with different promotion speeds made a significant difference in controlling the imported cases and those who promoted faster better controlled the imported cases (β = - 0.841, P < 0.01). Mayors with full-time postgraduate education, titles, and majors in science and engineering had a better effect on controlling the number of confirmed cases.
Conclusions:
Our study provides evidence that the official accountability system has played an important role in containing the pandemic, which suggests that local officials motivated by the accountability system would respond to the pandemic actively for higher utility. Furthermore, provincial governors and mayors have played a coordinated effect in pandemic control. The above evidences reveal that implementing the official accountability system could improve the government's emergency management capability and the efficiency of pandemic control. Therefore, adopting a strict accountability system could be effective in pandemic containment globally, especially in centralized countries.
... Deng et al. [23] have argued that officials are motivated to distort environmental policies for GDP growth; they neglect to enforce environmental regulations. Moreover, Chen et al. [24] pointed out that the negative impact of political promotion pressure on environmental protection is not invariable. After 2010, this negative effect diminished due to carbon emissions policies. ...
... Since the 1980s, economic growth and people's livelihood have been regarded as important criterion for evaluating the performance of local officials [14]. Therefore, the approach of using three indicators, namely GDP growth rate, fiscal surplus rate, and unemployment rate, to construct the promotion pressure index is widely accepted in China [24,37]. The formula is as follows: ...
Government policy is important for China's renewable energy technological innovation (RETI). However, little focus on the role of government officials who are the decision-makers. Using the panel data of 30 Chinese provinces from 2002 to 2018, we aim to examine the impact of the pressure of political promotion on RETI with the dynamic least squares (DOLS), fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS), and feasibility generalized least squares (FGLS) methods. The results of FMOLS, DOLS, and FGLS show that per unit increase in pressure of political promotion decreases RETI by 3.1%, 6.2%, and 2.7%, respectively. This inhibitory effect is greatest in hydropower technological innovation, followed by technological innovations in wind power and energy storage. But no evidence supports the pressure of political promotion inhibits technological innovations in solar, biomass, and marine energy. Moreover, the results of the panel threshold model suggest that when GDP and foreign direct investment (FDI) exceed 3085 billion yuan and 7.928 billion US dollars, respectively, the inhibitory effect of the pressure of political promotion on RETI is insignificant. Finally, mechanism analysis reveals the pressure of political promotion affects RETI through reduced FDI, trade openness, and government intervention, with mediating effects of 0.054, 0.109, and 0.052, respectively.
Within the behavioral framework of Chinese local government officials, the establishment and pursuit of ambitious fiscal revenue targets emerge as both a potent instrument and a prerequisite for realizing political aspirations. This study investigates the influence of fiscal revenue targets on corporate carbon emissions. Our findings indicate that elevating the threshold of fiscal revenue targets significantly curtails enterprise carbon emissions. This effect is manifested through heightened corporate expenditure on pollution charges and increased levels of green innovation. Our research furnishes valuable insights for carbon governance by fiscal revenue target management in developing nations.
