How Does China Develop Green Service Industries? A Perspective on Policy Evolution

In the process of promoting the development of a low-carbon economy, green services lag behind the green manufacturing industry. This paper applies the textual analysis method and systematically analyses the evolutionary trends and structural characteristics of green service policies to further optimise the service policy system and strengthen the quality of the green service supply. This paper identifies 859 policies introduced since 1986 and uses the content analysis method to analyse changes in the number of policies, the relationships between policy subjects, the formal types of texts and the composition of policy instruments. The results show that (1) the number and overall effectiveness of green service industry policies promulgated by the central government are increasing, such that the formulation of green service industry policies has passed the exploratory phase and has entered the stage of high-quality development; (2) there is a wide range of obvious interministerial cooperative phenomena, the modes of cooperation are relatively fixed, and the overall intersuperior cooperation has been strengthened but is characterised by phased development; (3) the distribution of policy forms is uneven, with many documents characterised by low effectiveness and a lack of high-efficiency documents; (4) the policy object structure is relatively complete, but the industrial distribution is unbalanced; (5) there is an imbalance among the three policy tools of supply, environment and demand. Those tools that are embodied in the environment are deemed more important than those of supply and demand.