ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Environ. Sci.
Sec. Environmental Economics and Management
This article is part of the Research TopicIs All Politics Local When the Problem is National? The Role of Local Governments in Mitigating Climate ChangeView all 5 articles
How does government intervention affect regional air pollution? The role of intergovernmental tax competition and local environment regulation
Provisionally accepted
- 1Monash Business School, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
- 2China Academy of Public Finance and Public Policy, Central University of Finance and Economics, Beijing, China
- 3Departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, United States
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The behavioral motivation and decision-making incentives of local governments are key aspects that affect the effectiveness of environmental management. This study takes Chinese local governments as the research object, selects the provincial dynamic panel data of Chinese Mainland from 2007 to 2020 for empirical estimation, and confirms that local government intervention plays an important role in the environmental pollution management of the jurisdiction: Under a single task orientation, tax competition will exacerbate air pollution, while environmental regulations will alleviate air pollution; Under the premise of parallel tasks and limited resources, these two local strategies have a restraining effect on each other and perform as a nonlinear relationship. The ultimate result is that the positive effects of environmental regulations cannot reverse the negative effects of tax competition. Furthermore, we introduced a spatial model and confirmed that there is an obvious spatial correlation between local government behavior. In the promotion tournament and "beggar thy neighbor" competition mode, local governments transfer the negative impact of tax competition to other regions, while keeping the positive impact of environmental regulations within their jurisdiction.
Keywords: Air Pollution, environmental regulation, spatial correlation, tax competition, threshold effect
Received: 18 Oct 2025; Accepted: 16 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Qiu, Liu and Zhen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Zhuoxuan Liu
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