While China has achieved rapid economic growth in the past several decades, such growth has also caused serious environmental problems. Local governments' tolerance and indulgence pollution is one of ...the key factors. Therefore, the state has established a generally centralized environmental governance system. This empirical study proposes an Objective-Conduct-Performance model to explain environmental regulation differences between developed countries and China, and attempts to analyze local governments' environment deregulation in the context of environmental centralization using data from Chinese provinces from 1997 to 2015. Our results indicate the following findings. First, newly transferred officials exert influence that is characterized by a fall-rise pattern in CO2 emissions during the few first years of the officials' new terms. Second, the centralized environmental governance and strict legal rules may provide strong restrictions on local governments' environment deregulation. Third, market forces are a driver of local governments' environment deregulation rather than a constraint. Last but not least, top officials transferred from adjacent provinces are more likely to ease environmental regulations than those from non-adjacent provinces. Thus, we can conclude that local government officials in China have a powerful motive to ease environmental regulations, leading to a failed effort to restrain local government officials’ further measures in spite of the severity of laws, regulations, and the unfamiliarity of administrative circumstances. This is perhaps due to a lack of political and economic power structures that match environmental centralization. Asymmetric incentives make local government officials tend to prioritize the goal of economic growth over environmental quality.
This article interrogates the role of local Chinese governors in government-driven urbanisation. This process often involves local governments converting rural land to urban land rather than local ...governments incentivising rural-to-urban migration. This study proposes a method to find a proxy variable of government-driven urbanisation and performs an exploratory study of its impact on economic growth. Its empirical analysis is based on provincial data from 1996 to 2015, a period of intense urbanisation in China. The results show that urbanisation has had various effects on growth across different provinces, and that some provinces exhibit a phenomenon called ‘urbanisation without growth’. This may be because local governors push urbanisation too heavy that it can hardly generate positive effects, such as external consumption, technology diffusion, and a larger pool of urban labour. This is similar to the phenomenon of over-urbanisation experienced in some developing countries. As a main driver of over-urbanisation, government-driven urbanisation has typical Chinese characteristics, but this paper's findings still have significant implications for other emerging economies.
•Government-driven urbanization happens when governors force farmers to migrate into urban areas.•Government-driven urbanization results in over-urbanisation in Chinese provinces.•Chinese governors are inclined to interrupt the process of market-based urbanisation to boost economic growth.•Government-driven urbanization would impede regional economic growth.
Abstract
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been identified as a critical factor influencing consumer decision‐making. However, there has been little empirical research on whether and how CSR ...affects consumer outcomes in the context of natural disasters. Against the backdrop of the Erke donation event that occurred during the flood in Henan Province, China, the present study examined the relationship between perceived corporate social responsibility (PCSR) and consumer purchase intention/behavior during a special period. We found that PCSR was positively related to consumers' purchase intention and purchase behavior. We also found that while national identity partially mediated the association between PCSR and purchase intentions, this mediating effect was not found in the path from PCSR to purchase behavior. Additionally, we found that herd mentality moderated the direct relationship between PCSR and purchase intention, but not the mediated path.
The difficulty of charging electric vehicles (EVs) is now hindering their further development. Governments generally choose to build stations for home charging (including piles) within residential ...communities. Given the conflict of interest between various government agencies and property management companies, constructing a charging station within residential communities would result in welfare loss for the property management companies and therefore lead to the principal–agent problem. This paper constructs a two-period imperfect information game theory model to study the moral hazard involved in this issue and government agencies׳ optimal choice. In the analytic solution of the model, we find that the optimal choice for a farsighted government agency is to constantly improve the incentive mechanism and introduce charging stations only when the conflict of interest is eliminated. Any benefits derived from government regulations by force would prove short-lived. The government should focus on long-term returns in the development of EVs, and its optimal mechanism should be designed to mitigate the principal–agent problem of property management companies, thereby accelerate the progress of EV charging infrastructure and improve overall social welfare.
•The charging of electric vehicles (EVs) is hindering their use.•A game theory model is used for analysis of EV charging station construction.•Charging stations are in residential communities in China.•Government agencies are constantly improving incentive mechanisms.
This article shows that turnover of local governors increases the similarity of fiscal policies using the data of 320 prefectural-level cities from 2005 to 2012 in China. More generally, local ...governors duplicate successful experience rather than explore policies accommodating the specificity of their ruling areas when they are faced with new administrative circumstances. The structure and effects of the network resulting from the imitation of policies could be an important research topic in the future.
