Residential Awareness and Environment Improvement: Evidence from the River Chief System in China

讲座内容简介：   

Water pollution is a highly prominent problem in many developing countries, including China. Over 30% of surface water in China was reported contaminated round the end of 2016. To tackle this detrimental situation, China initiated a flagship institutional innovation on river governance called the River Chief System (RCS), which requires the government to disclose information on administrative responsibilities and invite public supervision. Using 1,234 self-collected questionnaires in 2018 and 2019 from residents in Shanghai, this paper exploits the variation in the timing when each town/subdistrict in Shanghai establishes the local River Chief Office to identify the causal effect of information disclosure on the environment of rivers from the perspective of public participation. Our model expands the traditional public goods theory to a discrete-choice application, and shows that the RCS can potentially lead to outcomes closer to the social optimal. The empirical results confirm the improvement in water quality under the RCS, and further show that local residents’ willingness and actual action to involve in river management increases with information disclosure, which may play a critical role in the long-term effectiveness of environmental policies.

讲座嘉宾简介：     

Tianshu Li is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Urban Development of Nanjing Audit University. He graduated from the University of Virginia with a Ph.D. in Economics, and then worked as a postdoctoral research associate at the Darden School of Business on interdisciplinary projects in water resources. His main fields of interest are environmental and natural resource economics, development economics, and regional economics. His recent research topics cover water market, water quality management, forestation, carbon emission, poverty alleviation, etc. He has publications at journals in Economics and Environmental Sciences, including Nature Sustainability, The World Bank Economic Review, Land Economics, and Advances in Water Resources.