Environmental Target Responsibility System,Environmental Governance and Endogenous Economic Growth
As socialism with Chinese characteristics has entered a new era,the principal contradiction facing Chinese so-ciety has been identified as that between unbalanced and inadequate development and the people's ever-growing needs for a better life.The people's need for a beautiful ecological environment has become an important aspect of this contra-diction,and building an ecological civilization has been written into the Constitution and the Party Constitution.Environ-mental issues not only affect sustained economic development but also hold significant implications for people's liveli-hood and political affairs.How to effectively formulate and implement environmental policies to achieve the coordinated development of economic growth and ecological civilization is a great theoretical and practical problem facing the Chi-nese government.Economic decentralization and political centralization make local officials pursue the maximization of economic per-formance and artificially formulate relatively loose environmental regulation policies,resulting in serious environmental pollution problems.The local governments should bear the main responsibility for environmental issues.For a long time,local officials did not have enthusiasm for environmental governance,resulting in a paradox of"high attention"from the central government and"strategic implementation"by the local governments.Existing studies tend to attribute the failure of environmental governance to the insufficient implementation of local governments while neglecting the role of the cen-tral government's responsibility in ecological environmental governance.Based on the environmental target responsibility system with Chinese characteristics,we construct an endogenous growth model to analyze the transmission mechanism of the environmental target responsibility system on economic growth and social welfare,which provides a new perspective for understanding the dynamic relationship between eco-nomic growth and environmental quality in China.Under the framework incorporating the central and local governments,the paper constructs a growth model with an environmental target responsibility system,and then examines the impact of the central government environmental target responsibility system on the local government,enterprise and household be-haviors,and the influence of the behavior change of economic subjects on economic growth and social welfare.Green de-velopment and innovative development are both driving forces of economic growth and important aspects of the new de-velopment philosophy,and their positive external attributes require the government to compensate for market failures through financial resources.This paper further investigates the impact of the environmental target responsibility system on the local governments'efforts in environmental protection and innovation.This paper finds that the impact of the environmental target responsibility system on economic growth is uncertain,which depends on its positive effect on the environment,its negative effect on total factor productivity,and local govern-ments'environmental expenditure effect.A moderate environmental target responsibility system can improve environ-mental quality,promote innovation,and enhance social welfare.However,an excessive environmental target responsibil-ity system will reduce economic growth and social welfare.The effects of the environmental target responsibility system on economic growth and social welfare are both inverted U-shaped.The loss of economic growth rate corresponding to the change from economic growth maximization to social welfare maximization is small,which indicates that we do not need to worry about the economic growth inhibition effect of the environmental target responsibility system.After taking into account the innovation expenditure,the environmental target responsibility system will inhibit economic growth by crowding out the local governments'investment in innovation.The policy recommendations mainly include the following points:(1)improve the evaluation index system of the lo-cal officials'performance and fully implement the philosophy of green development;(2)design a scientific environmen-tal target responsibility system to achieve a dynamic balance between ecological protection and economic development;(3)integrate environmental policies with innovation policies to promote coordinated development of green and innova-tive development;(4)establish incentive policies corresponding to the environmental target responsibility system and re-duce the negative effect of the environmental target responsibility system on total factor productivity through technologi-cal innovation and resource allocation.
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