IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/jenpmg/v64y2021i7p1184-1203.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Do industrial pollution activities in China respond to ecological fiscal transfers? Evidence from payments to national key ecological function zones

Author

Listed:
  • Changan Gong
  • Jianhua Zhang
  • Hao Liu

Abstract

The policy of payments to National Key Ecological Function Zones (NKEFZs), a type of instrument for Ecological Fiscal Transfers, has been introduced in China. We employed propensity score matching and difference in difference estimation to investigate the effectiveness of this policy on the reduction of industrial pollution. We found evidence that the policy had reduced pollution-intensive activity in the NKEFZs. Meanwhile, implementation of the policy had been selective. First, the downstream NKEFZs with higher opportunity costs had lower efforts to reduce industrial pollution. Because performance-based payment mechanisms neglect opportunity costs, financial stress weakens the efforts to reduce pollution. Secondly, the NKEFZs policy suppresses air-polluting industries but not water-polluting industries. Local governments may reduce only the target pollutant (chemical oxygen demand) while ignoring non-target pollutants. There may be moral hazards under information asymmetry in pollution reduction.

Suggested Citation

  • Changan Gong & Jianhua Zhang & Hao Liu, 2021. "Do industrial pollution activities in China respond to ecological fiscal transfers? Evidence from payments to national key ecological function zones," Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 64(7), pages 1184-1203, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:jenpmg:v:64:y:2021:i:7:p:1184-1203
    DOI: 10.1080/09640568.2020.1813695
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09640568.2020.1813695
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/09640568.2020.1813695?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Wang, Mingzhe & Huang, Hai & Xiong, Jie & Yuan, Zhe & Zeng, Keya, 2023. "Impact of ecological reserves on the local residents’ health: Evidence from a natural experiment in China," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 336(C).
    2. Julio López-Laborda & Andoni Montes-Nebreda & Jorge Onrubia, 2023. "Going green through local fiscal equalisation," Working Papers 2023-07, FEDEA.
    3. Sun, Hong & Cheng, Nanyang & Zhang, Renjian & Shen, Wenxing & Miao, Chunxia, 2024. "Repression or promotion? Transfer payments, ecological constraints, and enterprise development," Finance Research Letters, Elsevier, vol. 63(C).
    4. Yang, Qiuyue, 2023. "Do vertical ecological compensation policies promote green economic development: A case study of the transfer payments policy for China’s National Key Ecological Function Zones," Economic Systems, Elsevier, vol. 47(4).
    5. Siying Yang & Hua Bai & An Li, 2023. "A futile help: do vertical transfer payments promote haze control?," Economic Change and Restructuring, Springer, vol. 56(5), pages 3411-3436, October.
    6. Cheng, Yuhong & Ma, Ben & Sun, Yidan, 2023. "Does central ecological transfer payment enhance local environmental performance? Quasi-experimental evidence from China," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 212(C).
    7. Meiyu Liu & Guofeng Zhang & Du Yang, 2022. "Do the National Key Ecological Function Zones Promote Green Development? Evidence from the Yanshan–Taihang Mountainous Area in Hebei Province, China," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(16), pages 1-19, August.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:jenpmg:v:64:y:2021:i:7:p:1184-1203. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/CJEP20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.