摘要：
The industrial pollution caused by China's unprecedent economic expansion seriously imperils public health, giving rise to public's high demand for better environmental quality. The paper employs the difference-in-differences (DID) methodology to conduct a quasi-natural experiment based on the Pollution Information Transparency Index (PITI) to evaluate the public participation impact on pollution emissions reduction and environment technology efficiency. The results show that PITI information disclosure has a positive influence on pollution emissions reduction, however, some existing literatures may overstate the effect of public participation on environment improvement in China, the empirical results show that government administrative measures still play essential role at current stage. The paper also finds that the influence of public participation exists in eastern China rather than in central and western China. In addition, the results of using environment technology efficiency as outcome variable show insignificant effect, but eastern China has positive environment technology efficiency, suggesting that economic development may increase enterprise technological input, hence achieving mutually beneficial achievements of economy and ecological efficiency.
作者机构：
[Zhou, Tao; Tu, Zhengge] Cent China Normal Univ, Sch Econ & Business Management, Wuhan 430079, Hubei, Peoples R China.;[Zhang, Ning] Shandong Univ, Inst Blue & Green Dev, Weihai 264200, Peoples R China.;[Zhang, Ning] Jinan Univ, Dept Econ, Guangzhou 510000, Guangdong, Peoples R China.
通讯机构：
[Zhang, Ning] S;[Zhang, Ning] J;Shandong Univ, Inst Blue & Green Dev, Weihai 264200, Peoples R China.;Jinan Univ, Dept Econ, Guangzhou 510000, Guangdong, Peoples R China.
关键词：
pollution levy standards reform;green total factor productivity;DEA;Difference-in-Differences
摘要：
<jats:p>Estimating the impact of environmental taxes on economic output is of great theoretical value for promoting green growth in China. Using a dataset of 232 cities from 2004 to 2014, this paper investigates the effect of pollution levy standards reform (PSR) on green total factor productivity (GTFP). We employ directional distance functions (DDF) computed by data envelopment analysis (DEA) to derive GTFP based on the Malmquist–Luenberger (ML) productivity index. Then, we investigate the impacts of PSR on China’s GTFP using Difference-in-Differences (DID) estimation. The results reveal that PSR has an inhibitory effect on GTFP, via the mechanism of technological change. Furthermore, PSR has heterogeneous impacts on different city types. The results indicate that PSR statistically significantly reduces GTFP in key environmental protection cities (KEPCs), large cities, and eastern cities, but that it has less impact on non-KEPCs, small/medium cities, megacities, and cities in central areas.</jats:p>
作者机构：
[TU Zhengge; Shen Renjun] School of Economics and Business Administration, Central China Normal University, Wuhan, China
通讯机构：
[TU Zhengge] S;School of Economics and Business Administration, Central China Normal University, Wuhan, China
关键词：
Total factor productivity;Frontier technology progress;Technical efficiency;Scale economy;Allocative efficiency;Large and medium-sized industrial enterprises (LMIE)
摘要：
China’s economy has experienced a high-rate growth since the reform and opening up in 1978. However, some macro-statistics indicated that China’s economy grows with a low efficiency. In fact, these conclusions based on macro-statistics and the performance of the economy as a whole cannot reflect the multi-level, dynamic and, therefore, complicated situation of China. By using firm-level data, and the stochastic frontier production model, this paper makes an investigation on the changing trends of TFP of China’s LMIE between 1995 and 2002, and the decomposition of factors of growth. Main findings include: (1) the weighted average of the annual growth of TFP in China’s large and medium sized industrial enterprises was as high as 6.8 % with a rising trend during 1996-2002; (2) the contribution to TFP growth by the factor of Frontier Technology Progress reached as much as 14 percentage points per annum on average; (3) the decline in Technical Efficiency (Relative to the Frontier) reduced the TFP growth by 7.1 percentage points per annum on average; (4) Allocative Efficiency contributed on average only 0.02 percentage points per annum to the TFP growth and Scale Dis-Economy slowed the growth of TFP by 0.33 percentage points per annum. The results show that at the turn of the century, the most important part of China’s industry was in the middle of an industrial productivity revolution driven by both Frontier Technological Progress and the great potential of technical efficiency of lagging enterprises. The revolution is driven by increased competition, privatization, foreign investment, and business expansion.
