The effectiveness of environmental authoritarianism: Evidence from China's administrative inquiry for environmental protection

Yongyou Nie, Dandan Cheng and Kui Liu

Energy Economics, 2020, vol. 88, issue C

Abstract: In order to improve China's environmental quality, the central government has strengthened the environmental responsibility of local governments, and adopted supervision tools such as environmental protection inquiries and inspections to promote local governments to be more proactive in environmental issues. In this paper, the global non-radial direction distance function (NDDF) and difference-in-difference (DID) method are used to analyze the impact of the environmental protection inquiry on energy-environmental efficiency. Specifically, taking energy, capital, and labor as input factors, regional GDP as desirable output, and sulfur dioxide, dust, and wastewater emissions as undesirable outputs, the unified energy-environmental efficiency index (UEEI) of each city has been estimated with the global NDDF method. The results show that UEEI in the eastern and central regions are relatively high, while that in the north and northeast regions are relatively low. On this basis, the impact of environmental protection inquiry on UEEI of each city is analyzed with the DID method. The results show that the environmental protection inquiry can significantly improve the energy-environmental efficiency of atmospheric pollutants, but the effect on energy-environmental efficiency of wastewater emission is not significant.

Keywords: Environmental protection inquiry; Global non-radial direction distance function; Difference-in-difference; Environmental authoritarianism; Energy-environmental efficiency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H23 I18 O13 P28 Q51 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:eneeco:v:88:y:2020:i:c:s0140988320301171

DOI: 10.1016/j.eneco.2020.104777

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