From race-to-the-bottom to strategic imitation: how does political competition impact the environmental enforcement of local governments in China?

In China, national environmental regulations have customarily found themselves to be inhibited by local government’s ostensible obedience. This research investigates how local officials, motivated and constrained by political competition, dedicate themselves to the environment and interact with each other regarding environmental regulation implementation and actual regulatory performance. Based on a spatial econometric model using data from 30 provinces from 2000 to 2016, the empirical results document the spatial dependence of environmental regulatory enforcement among provinces of similar economic levels and reveal that since 2007, there has been a performance-oriented peer competition for SO2 emission reduction but no similar competition for CO2 emission reduction. The findings indicate a transformation of the regulatory behavior of local governments from a race-to-the-bottom to strategic imitation and provide institutional insight into the spatial attributes of environmental enforcement under the impact of the political regime in China.