Although China is currently in a high-quality development stage, it faces serious resource and environmental challenges due to overexploitation, mismanagement, and unreasonable utilization. Especially in recent years, the problem of haze has become more serious. PM is also produced by natural processes;2.5, anthropogenic emissions remain the main source of this particulate matter. It is also the main cause of CO2 emissions (Li et al., 2022; Jeong et al., 2018). The challenges of “haze reduction” and “carbon reduction” have something in common. Most of the haze emissions and carbon emissions come from fossil fuel combustion (Xin and Xin, 2022; Liu et al., 2018). Therefore, it is urgent to synergize haze management and low-carbon development to achieve environmental optimization and climate change mitigation (Wang et al., 2023a; Lin et al., 2023). Building an ecological civilization is a long-term strategy to ensure human welfare. Therefore, the government should place more emphasis on haze control and carbon reduction activities to create a situation where green development and low-carbon economy work together (Liu et al., 2023).
Achieving haze and carbon reduction is a long-term challenge, and policy decentralization at this stage allows us to explore innovative approaches to low-carbon and green growth. The fiscal reform of the “provincially managed prefectures” has made the prefecture-level finance directly responsible for the budget management system, transfer payments, special fund subsidies, revenue reporting, and funding schedules at the prefecture level. Such a mechanism could potentially overcome many of the problems of existing systems. The current city/county system was originally designed to spread the economy of the central city to surrounding areas by establishing dispatch agencies. However, the dispatch source has gradually developed into a prefecture-level city that is an independent administrative agency, and the number of administrative agencies has increased markedly. Along with this, expenditures for administrative management have also increased rapidly. A large number of administrative agencies tends to cause duplication and waste of resources, resulting in a loss of administrative efficiency.
China's economic strategy means that economic growth will not benefit all regions equally, but the transition from a socialist planned economy to a socialist market economy will increase the likelihood that some regions will catch up with the global economy. He clearly acknowledged that. Although fiscal decentralization in China has brought about economic growth (Akai and Sakata, 2002), it has also significantly increased regional inequality (Qiao et al., 2008). Existing empirical data shows that fiscal decentralization can influence the effectiveness of regional carbon emission reductions (Cheng et al., 2020) and potentially contribute to haze amelioration as well. (Jiang et al., 2019). Fiscal decentralization can enable proprietary innovations in regional renewable energy and contribute to regional energy transition (Zhang et al., 2022), green development (Wang et al., 2023b), and regional development in terms of carbon reduction and reduction. can promote carbon emission efficiency and regional TFP. Efficiency (Cheng et al., 2020).
To precisely identify the impact of state-controlled county fiscal reform on carbon and haze emissions, this paper takes the reform as a quasi-natural experiment and uses a time-varying DID method to determine the impact on carbon and haze emissions. We will investigate. Country-level data for China. The contributions to this paper are as follows. First, previous studies have mainly focused on the impact of fiscal decentralization on carbon emissions and pollution control in regions and municipalities (Tufail et al., 2023; Jian and Zheng, 2024). We discuss the impact of fiscal state-management-county on the collaborative governance of haze and carbon emission reductions. Furthermore, we extend the level of research to the county level and detail the scope of research on state finances and county regulations regarding the collaborative governance of haze and carbon emission reductions. Second, the existing Unlike the literature, this paper analyzes regional haze and its impact on carbon reduction. From a homology perspective, it is expected to lay the foundation for subsequent studies on the synergistic effects of haze and carbon reduction. Finally, this paper considers how synergies can be achieved under different political and economic characteristics, from the perspective of different political characteristics and economic backgrounds of the region.
The remainder of this document proceeds as follows. Section 2 presents the policy background and literature review. Section 3 provides details of the data and econometric model. Section 4 presents the empirical analysis. Section 5 describes the transmission mechanism. Section 6 presents further analysis. Finally, we discuss in Section 7.
