Evaluation of Government Performance in Haze Pollution Control and the Optimization Path in Beijing

In recent years, Beijing has been more often confronted with serious haze pollution, especially in autumn and winter. The People’s Government of Beijing Municipality has adopted a package of measures to control the haze pollution with its best efforts. To objectively evaluate how effective these haze pollution control measures are from different perspectives and in an all-round way, it is necessary to adopt a scientific and reasonable approach. Based on the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) idea, we establish a system of indexes to evaluate the government performance of Beijing in haze pollution control from the four perspectives of development quality, public services, government management and development potential, and use a combination of analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and entropy weight method (EWM) to determine the index weights, and objectively evaluate Beijing’s performance in haze pollution control from 2010 to 2016. The results show that the scores for the four perspectives are all on the rise, and since the implementation of the Air Pollution Prevention and Control Action Plan in 2013, the government’s haze pollution control measures have achieved significant results, and made a much higher overall score. On that basis, we propose the optimized path for Beijing’s haze pollution control, namely, accelerating the upgrading of development quality, improving the public services level, strengthening the government management, tapping the development potential of haze pollution control and increasing the linkage and cooperation between the governments of Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei.