Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

There could rarely be any public goods as more ubiquitous and essential as the quality of air. Yet, the notorious air pollution in China has been ubiquitous and everlasting in the past few years. Despite the global knowingly reputation being effective and efficient in devising and enacting governing policies, the common-pool resource management challenge (Ostrom, 2015) still remained in various policy areas, especially in the field of air pollution control, and led to heterogeneous policy effects and efficiency across China. After the issuing of Air Pollution Prevention and Control Action Plan by the State Council of China in the year of 2013, there were 231 out of 338 cities that failed to reach the transitional standards, PM2.5 below to 35 micrograms per cubic meter (µg/m3), as suggested by World Health Organization[1], at the end of 2017. Thus, exploring and examining the factors that caused the regional disparity is not only necessary but urgent given the immediate hazardous nature of air pollution. In addition, the governing lesson learned from this study can also be applied to other regulatory policy area in other developing countries.

In this study, with the data of 338 prefecture-level cities in China from 2013 to 2017, we attempt to first identify, through panel analysis, what are the factors driving cities (338) to have heterogeneous policy effects after the enactment of the regulation plan in the year of 2013. Furthermore, due to the urgency of this issue and the newly enacted air pollution 3-year action plan[2] targeting those failed cities in the year of 2018, this study also applies hazard ratio model to examine what the factors making those 107 cities to have efficient policy outcomes. The major variables of interests are the changing rate of API (Air Pollution Index) and the timing in reaching the target standards respectively. The major independent variables are the industrial proportion, expenditure on energy conservation, dummy variable of receiving penalty and average API of this area last year. Our preliminary results of the two analyses demonstrate the existence of collective-action problem as indicated in common-pool resource management as well as the governing effectiveness and efficiencies of penalty fee from the higher level of governing entities.

In sum, this study posits that that decentralizing the incentive (Zheng et al., 2015) to each consumer of the public goods not only can be the policy solution resolving the tragedy of commons (Harding, 1968) but can also more quickly create effective policy results. This study contributes not only contributes to the field of collaborative environmental governance (Bodin, 2017) but also public management literature in general.

References

Bodin, Ö. (2017). Collaborative environmental governance: Achieving collective action in social-ecological systems. Science, 357(6352), eaan1114.

Ostrom, E. (2015). Governing the commons. Cambridge university press.

Zheng, S., Yi, H., & Li, H. (2015). The impacts of provincial energy and environmental policies on air pollution control in China. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 49, 386-394.

[1] https://www.who.int/phe/health_topics/outdoorair/outdoorair_aqg/en/

[2] http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-07/03/c_137298879.htm