关键词: 公众环保诉求, 环境规制, 溢出效应, 模仿行为

Abstract: With the advancement of "service-oriented government" reform, the role of public demands in government policy formulation has become increasingly prominent. Focusing on the impact of inter-regional public environmental protection demands on government environmental regulation policies, this paper uses the spatial Durbin panel data model and combines direct and indirect effect analysis to empirically test the spatial effect of China’s inter-provincial public environmental protection demands on different types of local government environmental regulations. First, we find that public environmental protection demands have a significant positive impact on environmental regulatory supervision and revenue, but have a limited impact on environmental regulatory expenditure. Second, public environmental protection demands have a very strong positive spillover effect, that is, public environmental protection demands from neighboring areas can also significantly alert the local government to increase environmental regulation, which shows that the mechanismof public environmental protection demand to the government’s environmental regulation is not limited to the local administrative scope, but exerts a national impact. Third, local governments have imitated each other in environmental regulations, which means local governments will refer to and imitate similar policies in neighboring areas when formulating and implementing environmental regulatory policies. Based on these, wesuggest that the local government’s environmental assessment mechanism should be further improved to give full play to the important role of the public’ s environmental protection demands. It is also necessary to strictly enforce the environmental regulation requirements of local governments, and establish the role of model cities to give play to the positive role of inter-regional environmental regulation imitation.

Key words: Public Environmental Protection Demands, Environmental Regulation: Spillover Effect, Imitation