To read this content please select one of the options below:

(excl. tax) 30 days to view and download

Total environmental target constraints and border air pollution effects: deterioration or alleviation?

Bingbing Liu

Kybernetes

ISSN: 0368-492X

Article publication date: 22 November 2024

35

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to study the governance effect of total environmental target constraint policy (TETC) on border polluted areas. China’s administrative border areas are “pollution havens.” The paper analyzes how TETC affects the pollution situation in border areas. The TETC policy sets overall emission reduction targets for each province, and the achievement of these targets is closely related to the promotion of local officials. So, can TETC provide pollution control incentives for enterprises and governments? This deserves further research. By evaluating China’s overall environmental target policies, we can obtain directions for optimizing policy design.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper uses the difference-in-differences model to evaluate the impact of TETC on air pollution in boundary areas. Industrial enterprises located at the provincial border are in the treatment group, while industrial enterprises located within the province are in the control group. We also use group regression to analyze the policy impact effects caused by differences in urban resource endowment, types of corporate pollution and marketization levels. Finally, we constructed a spatial difference-in-differences model to analyze the distance heterogeneity of policy impacts.

Findings

TETC significantly reduces the SO2 emissions of enterprises in province borders areas compared with intra-provincial enterprises. TETC has reduced the proportion of highly polluting enterprises at province borders. Incentives for promoting officials have prompted local governments to increase environmental law enforcement and environmental protection investment, and the pollution emissions of border enterprises have been effectively alleviated. The heterogeneity analysis shows that TETC significantly restrains the pollution emissions with high pollution types, non-resource-based cities and enterprises with low market levels.

Research limitations/implications

As a developing country, China has generated a large amount of pollution during the process of industrialization. The government has taken a series of measures to reduce pollution emissions. The TETC is a typical policy with high policy constraints. Although this article tries to control the impact of some important air pollution policies as much as possible, it cannot control the impact of all other policies. So, the impact effects we empirically obtained may include some other policy factors, but these effects are relatively small and do not affect the overall regression results.

Originality/value

This paper has theoretical reference significance for optimizing the design of environmental policies, reducing the “principal-agent” problem of environmental governance and improving pollution control at province borders.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges the financial support for this research. This research was funded by a Significant Project of the National Social Science Foundation of China (No: 23&ZD102).

Competing interests: The author declares there are no competing interests.

Citation

Liu, B. (2024), "Total environmental target constraints and border air pollution effects: deterioration or alleviation?", Kybernetes, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/K-08-2024-2189

Publisher

:

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2024, Emerald Publishing Limited

Related articles