2025/11/25 by Chang Liu, Wei Peng, Siyi Zhang +2 · 1 voice
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Environmental Science · Social Sciences · #China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance #Energy, Environment, Economic Growth #Environmental and Social Impact Assessments
paper · doi:10.1080/1523908x.2025.2592789
openalex created_date 2025/11/25 · openalex publication_date 2025/11/25 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/15
The Chinese central government introduced the Cadre Evaluation System (CES) reform in December 2013 to prioritize environmental protection in performance evaluation. However, the impact of the reform on local environmental governance behavior remains uncertain. This study analyzed the panel data of 113 prefecture-level cities in China from 2009 to 2016, using a regression discontinuity design in time to evaluate the effect of the CES reform on local governments’ environmental information disclosure performance. The results indicate that the reform effectively disrupts the race-to-the-bottom trend in environmental information disclosure, which had been adopted by bottom-ranked local governments as characterized by the Pollution Information Transparency Index (PITI). The reform served as a deterrent and was successful in motivating bottom-ranked local governments to adopt a more environmentally responsible approach of development, which involved increased environmental information disclosure. However, it had no substantially comparable impact on top-ranked cities, which maintained high disclosure levels due to existing reputation effects from PITI rankings prior to the reform.