Abstract It is essential in the environmental governance system to activate the supervision and governance functions of media in preventing and controlling pollution. During the period of heavy air pollution, it is important to public health whether media supervision can effectively push local governments to execute emergency management measures and thus reduce pollutant concentration. Therefore, it is necessary to have an insight into the influences of media supervision on environmental governance. Our paper examines whether air pollution reports in newspapers are likely to increase during the period of heavy air pollution, and whether air pollution reports can improve the air quality consequently. In this way, we provide some empirical evidence for media supervision to improve air quality.Our paper finds that during the period of heavy air pollution, air pollution reports in the newspapers increase significantly, and air pollution reports significantly improve the air quality consequently. By manually reading air pollution reports and judging the mood, our paper confirms that negative reports rather than positive reports can promote the improvement of air quality, which alleviates the main endogenous problems in econometric analysis. In addition, using a propensity score matching method, prefecture level city samples and air quality data from other sources for a robustness analysis, our paper finds that the above conclusions still exist. Our paper also finds that local air pollution reports in the newspapers can better promote the improvement of air quality. And the effect of air pollution reports also depends on the media’s attention to air pollution and the city’s environmental information disclosure and supervision mechanism. During the period when media pay more attention to air pollution and in cities where a perfect environmental information disclosure and supervision mechanism have not yet been established, the effect of air pollution report is more significant.Our paper will make some contributions and innovations to existing literature as follows: first, our paper selects the period of heavy air pollution for discussion. The advantage is that the local governments’ efforts on air pollution control can be easily and directly reflected by air quality data, which helps us to study the effect of air pollution reports on improving air quality. Besides, we match the air pollution reports data with the daily air quality data. Compared with similar literature about media supervision and environmental governance, which uses survey data or annual data to study, we analyses the short-term impacts of air pollution reports on the improvement of air quality in more detail, therefore enriching the relevant research. Secondly, in the context of developing countries, our paper finds that media supervision can supplement the deficiencies of cities in environmental information disclosure and supervision mechanism, which has important insightful significance for countries and regions, where a perfect environmental information disclosure and supervision mechanism have not been established due to technical or institutional constraints. Thirdly, our paper extends the ideas for the central environmental protection department to supervise local air pollution control, and provides a valuable exploration for giving better play to the function of media in environmental governance.
Zheng Zhaopeng,Ye Jianliang,Shi Jinchuan. Can Air Pollution Reports Promote the Improvement of Air Quality? Evidences from the Period of Heavy Air Pollution[J]. JOURNAL OF ZHEJIANG UNIVERSITY, 2022, 52(3): 120-134.
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