官员更替、失信惩戒与环境质量

Political Turnover, Penalization for Loss of Credibility, and Environmental Quality

考察官员更替对地方政府环保行为的影响及其环境质量改善效果,是揭示地方环境治理行为逻辑的关键。基于京津冀、长三角、珠三角三地48个城市环境保护部门2015—2017年公布的污染处罚决定书及所处罚的758家国家重点监控企业,利用市委书记和环保局局长更替作为准自然实验,就官员更替对企业环境失信惩戒的影响进行探讨,并结合官员更替对环境质量的改善效果,讨论政治关联的干扰影响。研究发现,官员更替(市委书记更替)提升了对企业的环境失信惩戒,强化了地方政府环保行为,有利于大气环境质量改善;不过,政治关联表现出显著的负向调节作用,政治关联的存在掩盖了部分污染,削弱了官员更替对环境质量的改善作用。

Political turnover is an opportunity for local government to modify their environmental performance. Exploring the mechanism and interference effects of political turnover on environmental quality improvement is the key to revealing the logic of local environmental governance behavior. Based on the pollution penalization decisions for 758 key enterprises under state monitoring which were published by the environmental protection departments of 45 cities in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei and Yangtze and Pearl River Deltas from 2015 to 2017, we used the turnover of municipal Party secretaries and environmental protection bureau chiefs as a quasi-natural experiment to explore the impact of political turnover on the penalization of enterprises for the loss of environmental credibility and to discuss the interference effect of political association in conjunction with the effect of political turnover on the improvement of environmental quality. The results show that political turnover(municipal Party secretary turnover) enhances the penalization of enterprises for loss of environmental credibility, strengthens local governments’ environmental protection behavior, and contributes to the improvement of atmospheric environmental quality;however, political association shows a significant negative moderating effect, indicating that the presence of political association masks some pollution and weakens the effect of political turnover on environmental quality improvement.