Using three-sided dynamic game model to study regional cooperative governance of haze pollution in China from a government heterogeneity perspective

Evolution analysis of low-carbon cooperation of service providers based on Moran process in cloud manufacturing

Low-carbon cooperation among cloud manufacturing service providers is one way to achieve carbon peak and neutrality. Such cooperation is related to the benefits to service providers adopting low-carbon strategies and stochastic factors such as government low-carbon policies, providers' environmental awareness, and demanders' low-carbon preferences. Focusing on the evolutionary process of service providers' low-carbon strategy selection under uncertain factors, a stochastic evolutionary game model is constructed based on the Moran process, and the equilibrium conditions for low-carbon cooperation among providers are analyzed under benefit-dominated and stochastic factor-dominated situations. Through numerical simulation, the effects of the cloud platform's cost-sharing coefficient for low-carbon investment, matching growth rate, carbon trading price, and group size on providers' low-carbon strategy evolution are analyzed. The research results show that increasing the cloud platform's low-carbon cost-sharing, carbon trading price, and group size can promote low-carbon cooperation among service providers. With greater low-carbon investment costs and greater stochastic factor interference, the providers' enthusiasm for low-carbon cooperation decreases. This study fills the research gap in the low-carbon cooperation evolution of cloud manufacturing providers based on the stochastic evolutionary game and provides decision-making suggestions for governments and cloud platforms to encourage provider participation in low-carbon cooperation and for providers to adopt low-carbon strategies.

Is air pollution joint prevention and control effective in China-evidence from "Air Pollution Prevention and Control Action Plan"

This paper examined the effect of air pollution joint prevention and control on pollution emissions in China. Specifically, based on the panel data of 290 cities from 2007 to 2021, taking the implementation of the "Air Pollution Prevention and Control Action Plan" as a natural experiment, the difference-in-difference-in-difference (DDD) model was used to explore the effect of air pollution joint prevention and control on haze pollution. Results show that air pollution joint prevention has a significant impact on pollutant emissions either as a whole or as a single pollutant. In terms of individual urban agglomeration, whether the Yangtze River Delta or the Pearl River Delta urban agglomerations, the air pollution joint prevention and control policy has a significant impact not only on the overall reduction of pollutant emissions but also on the reduction of single PM2.5 or industrial sulfur dioxide emissions alone. Environmental regulations have also achieved the effect of haze control in general and have a significant impact on the reduction of PM2.5 or industrial sulfur dioxide emissions. Environmental regulations also significantly reduced PM2.5 emissions in these three urban agglomerations. These findings provide a scientific basis and essential reference for understanding the implementation effect of regional joint prevention and control policies comprehensively and objectively.

A dynamic game modeling on air pollution mitigation with regional cooperation and noncooperation

Mitigating regional air pollution involves multifaceted trade-offs, including long-term versus short-term development versus emission-reduction among different regions. Considering the heterogeneity of levels of regional economic development and capacity for environmental governance as well as the spatial spillover effect of pollution, the game theory method can explore each region's dynamic emission-reduction path. In this article, the dynamic game mechanism (Regional Environment Economy Game Modeling model) is incorporated into the environment economy system to solve the Nash equilibrium under dynamic conditions and explore the game strategies of each region. Taking air pollution mitigation in North China as an example, this article compares the emission-reduction effect and social welfare under regional cooperative and noncooperative game scenarios and clarifies the abatement-sharing mechanism between provinces. The results show that a noncooperative policy is strictly inferior to a cooperative policy for achieving given emission-reduction goals and maximizing social welfare. Our findings offer evidence for strengthening regional cooperation in reducing carbon emissions and provide policy recommendations for synergistic pollution abatement and joint regional pollution mitigation. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2023;19:1555-1569. © 2023 SETAC.

The optimal choice of environmental tax revenue usage: Incentives for cleaner production or end-of-pipe treatment?

The environmental tax system is effective in pollution abatement. However, levying an environmental tax may be detrimental to economic growth. Reasonable use of environmental tax revenue may achieve both environmental protection and economic growth. This study proposes to earmark environmental tax revenue for pollution treatment. Taking fiscal expenditure theory into consideration, environmental tax revenue usage is divided into transfer expenditure and purchase expenditure. An environmental computable general equilibrium (CGE) model is established to evaluate the effects of environmental tax revenue usage. The optimal choice is to increase the environmental tax rate and simultaneously use tax revenue for cleaner production subsidies and end-of-pipe treatment expenditures. Under the optimal scenario, pollutant retention decreases by 21.45%, and GDP increases by 0.006%. For most regions in China, it is better to raise the environmental tax rate to the middle level of a specified range. Moreover, the government should distribute environmental tax revenue evenly across the expenditure of different environmental protection projects.

How does new-type urbanization affect air pollution? Empirical evidence based on spatial spillover effect and spatial Durbin model

To alleviate the ecological and environmental problems caused by rapid urban development, China has formulated and implemented the new-type urbanization strategy. However, there is insufficient empirical research on the specific relationship between new-type urbanization and air pollution. Therefore, based on the panel data of 30 provinces in China from 2005 to 2018, this paper constructs a comprehensive evaluation index system of new-type urbanization using the five dimensions of population, economy, space, society, and green. The spatial Durbin model and the spatial mediating model are used to discuss the spatial effect, transmission mechanism, and regional heterogeneity of new-type urbanization on air pollution. The results show that China's air pollution mainly presents a spatial pattern of high-high agglomeration and low-low agglomeration, and there are spatial fluctuations. The construction of new-type urbanization significantly reduces local air pollution, and the industrial structure optimization, technological innovation, and energy structure adjustment are considered as important transmission mechanisms. However, under the fiscal decentralization and political tournament system in China, the policy implementation deviation may weaken the emission reduction effect of new-type urbanization, which is not conducive to regional environmental governance. From the sub-regional level, the impact of new-type urbanization on air pollution has regional heterogeneity. A robustness test confirms the reliability of our research conclusions. This study also proposes some policy suggestions that the government can utilize in grasping the policy focus of new-type urbanization construction to discover effective ways of controlling air pollution.

China's Jinshan Yinshan sustainability evolutionary game equilibrium research under government and enterprises resource constraint dilemma

This paper is based on analyzing the process of green innovation inspiration and green innovation compensation effect after the implementation of environmental regulations by the Chinese Government. This paper tests the hypothesis using the evolutionary game model and studies the underlying behavioral characteristics of the government, enterprises, and the relevant influencing factors. These influencing factors further aid in examining the evolution law applicable on both sides, which are aligned with the dynamic replication equation and evolutionary equilibrium states under different situations. The key variables used in this study include the concentration of government's environmental regulation, the cost of the regulations, economic penalties, enterprise's green innovation-related income, expenditures, and the enterprise's performance appraisal. Moreover, the results of this study reflect the system stability and equilibrium strategy on the proportion of retained earnings spent by enterprises on green innovation activities and the Government's strict environmental regulations. In the process of game strategy selection between the government and enterprises, the net income and weight of eco-efficiency indicators of the enterprises actively carrying out green innovation activities play a decisive role. Moreover, there should be reduced weight of economic benefits and increase the economic sanctions and innovation subsidies of enterprise pollution behaviors. Furthermore, reduced cost of regulations and innovation expenditures help guide enterprises to rationally allocate superior resources to enhance green enterprise innovation and take the level of innovation to the point that it achieves a win-win green sustainable development of economic performance and environmental performance.

Using cooperative game model of air pollution governance to study the cost sharing in Yangtze River Delta region

To solve the increasingly serious air pollution problem, regional air pollution collaborative governance as an effective way is introduced in this paper. Firstly, this study constructs a game model of regional air pollution collaborative governance, and three classic cost sharing methods are used to allocate the cost of air pollution governance; Then the emission reduction cost of regional cooperative governance is obtained; Finally, the study makes an empirical analysis on the cost sharing of SO₂ emission reduction by four local governments of the Yangtze River Delta region in 2017. The results show that: (i) The emission reduction cost of regional cooperative governance is better than that of individual governance, and in 2017 the cost of SO₂ cooperative governance in Yangtze River Delta region is reduced by about 1.8% compared with the individual governance; (ii) The Shapley value method is utilized to allocate the benefits of the cooperative SO₂ governance of four provinces in the Yangtze River Delta region, which indicates that all local governments can obtain certain profits from this cooperation and the cooperative alliance is stable; (iii) Collaborative governance of regional air pollution can meet the requirements of both collective rationality and individual rationality at the same time.

Evolutionary game analysis on industrial pollution control of local government in China

The pollution control of local government to industrial enterprises is actually a long-term, complex and dynamic game process. This study develops an evolutionary game model to analyze the operation mechanism of local governments' different expenditure preferences on the production behavior of industrial polluting enterprises, so as to specify the behavioral characteristics and optimal strategy of local environmental governance. The results indicated that whether the relationship between local governments and polluting enterprises in environmental governance becomes cooperative or collusive depends on their game sequence and initial endowment. Under the condition of realizing a steady state of cooperation, polluting enterprises would advance faster toward clean production if local governments distribute more environmental expenditures on cost subsidies for enterprises to implement clean production. The findings of this study provide decision-making basis for local governments to control industrial pollution.

Impact of rating and praise campaigns on local government environmental governance efficiency: Evidence from the campaign of establishment of national sanitary cities in China

BACKGROUND

Ecological and environmental protection is essential to achieving sustainable and high-quality development, which highlights the important role of environmental governance. In terms of the practical actions of environmental governance, the central government in China has carried out continuous rating and praise campaigns, and local governments have actively promoted this effort. However, the related performance consequences have not been empirically investigated. We aimed to verify whether this incentive policy can improve the efficiency of environmental governance and whether this governance method has long-term effects. In addition, we sought to identify mechanisms through which the policy can improve environmental governance.

METHOD

We take the rating and praise campaign of the Establishment of National Sanitary Cities (EONSCs) as a quasi-natural experiment and use the panel data for 174 cities from 2004 to 2016 and the propensity score matching-difference in differences (PSM-DID) method to test the impact of rating and praise campaigns on environmental governance efficiency.

RESULTS

EONSCs campaign can improve the efficiency of environmental governance by 0.7595 (p<0.01), which is significant at the 1% level; the effects are clearly significant during the evaluation process and the year in which cities are named National Sanitary Cities (NSCs) but decrease annually thereafter. The EONSCs campaign has a significant promoting effect on public services provision, such as public infrastructure investment, public transportation and education.

CONCLUSIONS

(1) The rating and praise campaigns can effectively improve the efficiency of environmental governance; (2) the incentive effect is distorted and is not a long-term effect; (3) the impact of the rating and praise campaign of EONSCs on the efficiency of environmental governance is mainly realized through the provision of corresponding public services that are closely related to environmental protection. The findings of this paper provide empirical support for the effectiveness of the central government's rating and praise campaigns and could motivate local governments to actively participate in environmental governance. Moreover, the findings provide an important reference for further improving the rating and praise campaigns and the level of environmental governance.

The objects, agents, and tools of Chinese co-governance on air pollution: a review

The social and economic development in China has not only made a series of great achievements but also suffered from increasingly serious air pollution. It is of great significance to explore the co-governance mechanism of air pollution in order to promote high-quality development and the construction of "beautiful China." Based on an analysis using the concept of co-governance, this paper reviews the research from four aspects: the multi-object relationships, multi-agent framework, and the co-governance technical tools and policy tools. The results show that the current research has many deficiencies: a lack of research on the size, direction, and driving factors of the correlation of objects; the construction of the multi-agent framework focused only on concepts and lacking the design of core mechanisms; evaluating only the effect of tools but ignoring the optimal combination of governance tools, and paying attention only to the traditional pollutants and disregarding the latest air pollution. Accordingly, this paper finds that the research should be expanded from four aspects, which include taking into account the co-governance of new air pollution, clarifying the relationship between the various types of air pollutants and the driving factors, building a multi-disciplinary research framework for co-governance, and optimizing the combination of governance policies and technical tools in order to realize high-quality development of China.

Regional policy synergy and haze governance-empirical evidence from 281 prefecture-level cities in China

The spatial spillover effect of haze pollution makes the local independent governance model inefficient, and it requires regional synergy to achieve the relatively high efficiency of haze governance. This article counts the frequency of environmental policy vocabulary in the government work reports of 30 provinces in China (mainly include the words ecology, pollution, energy, atmosphere, low carbon, etc.) and multiplies it with the proportion of the added value of the secondary industry in the GDP of the 281 prefecture-level cities under the jurisdiction of each province to obtain quantitative policy information and then use gray relational analysis to measure the degree of policy synergy of 281 prefecture-level cities in China. Finally, based on the data of PM2.5 and the degree of policy synergy of 281 prefecture-level cities in China from 2007 to 2016, combined with the data of a series of urban characteristic variables, the dynamic panel model is used to empirically examine the impact of regional policy synergy on haze governance. The results of the study show that between 2007 and 2016, the level of haze pollution is relatively high, ranging from 30 to 65 μg/m³, with the highest level in the central and eastern regions, ranging from 50 to 65 μg/m³, and relatively low in the northeast and west, ranging from 30 to 50 μg/m³. The degree of policy synergy among China's regions has been volatile during the evolution and is between primary synergy and mild imbalance. The degree of policy synergy has a significant negative impact on haze pollution, and the impact coefficient is about - 0.3; that is, policy synergy has a significant positive effect on haze governance. In addition, the industrial structure with a high proportion of secondary industry, the agglomeration of the population, and the production activities it brings will increase the haze pollution in China, and the increase in government expenditure on science and technology will help alleviate the haze pollution. The government can strengthen regional policy synergy, improve the mechanism of synergistic governance in various regions, and formulate strict and unified standards of regional environmental management based on the conditions of each region.

Can China's pollution reduction mandates improve transboundary water pollution?

This paper discusses how the pollution prevention mandate imposed by China's central government triggers water pollution across provincial borders. Because the central government has put the pollutant reduction into the promotion evaluation, and pollution control in the downstream area of a province mainly brings benefit to other regions, the provincial officials are incentivized to reduce the water pollutants away from the downstream city and strengthen environmental regulation within the province. We apply the difference-in-differences-differences (DDD) method to the dataset on water quality in cities along 18 major rivers in China from 2007 through 2016. We find that compared with the interior cities, the most downstream city of a province faces worse water quality. Besides, we find that environmental policy significantly increases the extent of pollution across jurisdictional boundaries. Then, we turn on the mechanism and find that the pollutant reduction target is significantly lower in the most downstream city of a province. Unanticipated provincial government behavior leads to severe transboundary water pollution.

How Does Technological Innovation Mediate the Relationship between Environmental Regulation and High-Quality Economic Development? Empirical Evidence from China

Technological innovation is considered to be an effective way to promote the quality of economic development and green transition under environmental policies, while the specific mechanism of this process is still unclear. Thus, the purpose of this paper was to examine how technological innovation mediates the relation between environmental regulation and high-quality economic development. Based on the panel data of 34 industries in China from 2007 to 2015, this paper firstly calculated the green total factor productivity (GTFP) as a proxy variable for the quality of economic development through the super-slack-based measure model, and then analyzed the impact of environmental regulation and technical innovation on the GTFP by making use of the mediation effect model. The results showed that environmental-related policy directly affected the GTFP while technological innovation indirectly moderated this process, where the moderate impact of technological innovation was industrial heterogeneous. Specifically, the relation between environmental regulation and GTFP was positively and partially moderated by technological innovation in clean industries and high-tech industries, while positively but completely moderated by technological innovation in low-and medium-tech industries. Moreover, the mediating effect of technological innovation in pollution-intensive industries was positive but insignificant.

Research on the Transformation Path of the Green Intelligent Port: Outlining the Perspective of the Evolutionary Game “Government–Port–Third-Party Organization”

While promoting the global economy and trade, ports impose serious pollution on the global ocean and atmosphere. Therefore, the development of ports is restrained by the policies and measures of governments and international organizations used to cope with climate change and environmental protection. With the development of information technology, the operation and expansion of ports is facing forms of green and intelligent reform. This research aims to link the development of green intelligent ports, government policies, and third-party organizations to find the most suitable evolutionary path for the development of green intelligent ports. This paper assumes that governments will push ports to transform into green intelligent ports from the perspective of benefiting long-term interests, that the goal of ports is to maximize their profits, and that third-party organizations will actively promote the development of green intelligent ports. Based on these assumptions, this paper has established an evolutionary game theory model of “government–port–third-party organization” regarding the development of green intelligent ports. The Jacobian matrix of the game theory system was constructed by using the replicator dynamic equation, and local stability analysis was performed to obtain the equilibrium stability point of the entire system. This research reveals the limitations of the development of green intelligent ports without government involvement and explores the ability of third-party organizations to promote the implementation of policies, confirming the role of government regulation and control in promoting the development of green intelligent ports. This paper may be helpful for the development of green intelligent ports in the future. The results show that: (1) The main factors affecting the choice of port strategy are the benefits of building a green intelligent port, the intensity of government regulation, and the quantitative influence of third-party evaluation results on the port strategy selection. (2) Government decision-making plays an important role in port transformation. If the relevant government chooses the wrong strategy, then the transformation of the port will be delayed. (3) Government regulation and control need to change with the change of the evolution stage. (4) Compared with the macro-control policies of the government, the influence of the third-party organization on the port is significantly smaller.

Public Voice via Social Media: Role in Cooperative Governance during Public Health Emergency

With the development of the Internet, social networking sites have empowered the public to directly express their views about social issues and hence contribute to social change. As a new type of voice behavior, public voice on social media has aroused wide concern among scholars. However, why public voice is expressed and how it influences social development and betterment in times of public health emergencies remains unstudied. A key point is whether governments can take effective countermeasures when faced with public health emergencies. In such situation, public voice is of great significance in the formulation and implementation of coping policies. This qualitive study uses China's Health Code policy under COVID-19 to explore why the public performs voice behavior on social media and how this influences policy evolution and product innovation through cooperative governance. A stimulus-cognition-emotion-behavior model is established to explain public voice, indicating that it is influenced by cognitive processes and public emotions under policy stimulus. What is more, as a form of public participation in cooperative governance, public voice plays a significant role in promoting policy evolution and product innovation, and represents a useful form of cooperation with governments and enterprises to jointly maintain social stability under public health emergencies.

Does environmental information disclosure contribute to improve firm financial performance? An examination of the underlying mechanism

Given the widespread impacts of firm activities on the environment, firms are increasingly required to disclose environmental information. However, the relation between environmental information disclosure and firm financial performance is controversial and the mechanism through which environmental information disclosure affects financial performance is insufficiently investigated. This research examined the effect of environmental information disclosure on financial performance and explored the mediating effects of visibility (e.g., analyst coverage and institutional ownership) and liquidity. Panel data from 289 Chinese listed firms were analyzed with the assistance of STATA Software. The results revealed that environmental information disclosure positively (directly) affects financial performance. Further, environmental information disclosure also indirectly affects financial performance via analyst coverage (e.g., number of analysts and number of reports) and liquidity. Analyst coverage and liquidity mediate the relationship between environmental information disclosure and financial performance while institutional ownership has no mediating effect. According to the results, practical implications were discussed and future research directions were noted.

Does the expansion of the joint prevention and control area improve the air quality?-Evidence from China's Jing-Jin-Ji region and surrounding areas

The relationship between group size and alliance performance has long been concerned by the theoretical scholars, but their opinions vary from each other. China's air pollution prevention and control action in 2017-2018 expanded the core area of joint prevention and control from a minor alliance of "2 + 4" cities to a major alliance of "2 + 26" cities, which undoubtedly provides a good natural experiment for advancing theoretical research. In order to clarify whether the expansion of the cooperation scope of air pollution joint prevention and control will further improve the air quality, the paper uses the regression discontinuity design (RDD) to empirically analyze the original "2 + 4" cities and 22 newly added cities. The conclusions indicate that the expansion of the core area of air pollution joint prevention and control in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (Jing-Jin-Ji) region and surrounding areas is conducive to further improving regional air quality, and the improvement effect of the "2 + 4" cities in the original core area is greater than that of the newly added 22 cities. The improvement of air quality after the expansion of the alliance is attributed to the unified and coordinated supervision of trans-regional environmental protection agencies, which reduces the "free rider" behavior; the increase of alliance members is conducive to achieve better environmental governance and improve cooperation performance among alliance members. Therefore, it is proposed that when the joint prevention and control of air pollution area is mature, the city should expand the scope of the alliance appropriately, rationally control and strengthen the cooperation among cities within the regional alliance, and consolidate the achievements of inter-regional joint prevention and control air quality improvement.