中央督察常态化下的地方政府行为选择——来自中央环保督察常态化的经验证据

The Choice of Local Government Behavior under the Normalization of Central Inspection:Empirical Evidence from the Normalization of Central Environmental Protection Inspectors

中央环保督察作为一种推动国家治理现代化的制度供给,已逐渐实现常态化,并影响着地方政府的行为和治理实践。地方政府在常态化的中央环保督察下会表现出何种环保行为,相关的经验研究仍然不足。本文利用2014-2020年中国287个地级市的面板数据,将2017年“六大区域环保督察局”的成立视为中央常态化环保督察的准自然实验,以各个地级市与其所属区域环保督察局的空间距离作为处理组划分依据,采用强度DID方法实证回答了上述问题。研究发现:(1)常态化的中央环保督察虽然推动地方政府将更多的注意力资源分配到环保任务中,但是地方政府会采取象征性环保行为和选择性环保行为。地方政府既没有针对违规主体采取更加严格的惩罚措施,也没有积极治理那些未被中央经常考核的污染物。(2)区域环保督察局的纠偏作用具有明显的距离效应。当地方政府到其所属区域环保督察局的距离小于200公里时,地方政府会收敛象征性环保行为,然而选择性环保行为会随着地方政府到区域环保督察局距离的增加愈发明显。这是由于地理距离所带来的环保监管成本所致。(3)中央给予地方财政支持最有助于区域环保督察局发挥常态化的监管效果,而中央的人事支持和公众的参与也可以在一定程度上弥补常态化中央环保督察制度的不足。文章刻画了地方政府在中央常态化监管下的行为选择,进而为明晰常态化的中央环保督察制度的有效性提供了经验证据,也为完善常态化的中央环保督察制度设计提供了政策启示。

As an institutional provision to promote the modernization of national governance,central environmental inspectors have gradually become normalized and are influencing the behavior and governance practices of local governments.There is still a lack of relevant empirical research on what kind of environmental behavior local governments exhibit under such normalized central environmental protection inspectors.This paper uses panel data for 287 prefectural-level cities in China from 2014 to 2020,and considers the establishment of the"six regional environmental protection inspectorates"in 2017 as a quasi-natural experiment of normalized environmental protection inspectors.The above questions were answered empirically.It was found that(1)although normalized central environmental protection inspectors push local governments to allocate more attention resources to environmental protection tasks,local governments adopt symbolic environmental protection behavior and selective environmental protection behavior under such normalized central environ-mental protection inspectors.Local governments neither take stricter punitive measures against noncompliant subjects,nor actively manage those pollutants that are not assessed by regular central inspectors;(2)the deterrent effect of regional environmental protection inspectorates has an obvious distance decay effect.When the distance from the local government to the regional environmental protection inspectorate to which it belongs is less than 200 km,the local government will converge on symbolic environmental behavior,yet selective environmental behavior will become more and more pronounced as the distance from the local government to the regional environmental protection inspectorate increases.This is due to the cost of environmental regulation caused by geographic distance;(3)the central government's financial support to local governments is most helpful for the regional environmental inspectorates to play a regular regulatory role,while the central government's personnel support and public participation can also compensate to some extent for the lack of a regular central environmental inspection system.The article portrays the behavioral choices of local governments under central supervision,which in turn provides empirical evidence for clarif-ying the effectiveness of the standing central environmental inspection system and policy insights for improving the design of the standing central environmental inspection system.