How much are the Public Willing to Pay for the Environmental Protection: Evidence from Chinese General Social Survey Data

Environmental issues are already the focus of the world's attention. The government, as a provider of environmental public goods, has to take the unshirkable responsibility. In recent years, the Chinese government has also formulated many policies and adopted many measures for environmental protection and improvement, but the results are not satisfactory. The reason is that citizens' willingness to pay for environmental protection, as an important factor, has long been ignored. In order to explore the influencing factors of Chinese citizens' willingness to pay for environmental protection, this paper, based on China's comprehensive survey data, CGSS2010, employed principal component analysis to analyze the willingness to pay for environmental protection and obtained the willingness factor of environmental protection. Then, it analyzed the government trust and income by constructing OLS model. The results of the study showed that citizens' trust in the government would affect their willingness to pay for environmental protection, and in this process, the income level would exert the inhibiting effect on the relationship between two of them. The stronger the willingness of citizens to trust the government was, the better environment the citizens with higher income level needed, so these people were willing to pay for that. However, citizens with higher income levels did not necessarily trust the government more, so it would exert inhibiting effect on government trust and willingness to pay. This was one of the reasons why China's environmental governance was not very effective. In addition, the higher the degree of education was, the stronger the willingness to pay was, and the willingness to pay of members of the Chinese Communist Party was more than non-party members. The conclusions of the study provided a decision-making reference for the government to formulate environmental protection mechanisms, policies and measures.