 Environmental Regulations, Political Incentives and Local Economic Activities: Evidence from ChinaShiyu Bo Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 2021, vol. 83, issue 3, 812-835 Abstract: How do nationwide environmental regulations produce heterogeneous effects on the economic activities of manufacturing firms located in places with differently incentivized city leaders? This paper answers this question by drawing on a set of firm‐based pollution regulations in China from 2007 to investigate the relationship between political incentives and the effects of environmental regulations. I show that when a city's Party secretary has more incentives to be promoted, the adverse impacts on production by regulated firms tend to increase, but these losses for regulated firms are compensated by gains for other unregulated firms in polluting industries. Therefore, no overall reduction is seen in the manufacturing activities of the polluting industries. The findings suggest that if multitask problems for local governments are properly addressed, environmental regulations can effectively reduce the pollution and avoid large unintended costs to economic growth. Date: 2021 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:obuest:v:83:y:2021:i:3:p:812-835 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Christopher Adam, Anindya Banerjee, Christopher Bowdler, David Hendry, Adriaan Kalwij, John Knight and Jonathan Temple More articles in Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics from Department of Economics, University of Oxford Contact information at EDIRC. |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.