How does government attention matter in air pollution control? Evidence from government annual reports

Ambitious environmental action demands policymakers' attention. Since 2014, when China proclaimed a "war on pollution," government attention to environmental concerns has increased unprecedentedly. The purpose of this study is to determine empirically if, and to what extent, this government attention has had an effect on environmental quality, particularly local air pollution. We quantified local Chinese governments' attention to the environment from 2014 to 2019 using a dataset of the textual content of their Government Annual Reports (GARs) from 286 cities at or above prefectural level (APL). The Spatial Durbin Model (SDM) is selected as the most probable spatial econometric model using Bayesian posterior model probabilities. As demonstrated, environmental attention is related with perceptible increases in air quality. On average, a one-unit increase in environmental attention resulted with decreases of 4.2 %, 4.5 %, and 7.4 % in AQI index, PM10, and NO2 concentrations, respectively. As an auxiliary validation, we found evidence at provincial level that environmental agenda and investment in pollution control represent the primary outputs of increased environmental attention. A further analysis by subsample revealed that the effect of environmental attention on air pollution differed by region. In general, this study establishes a compelling rationale for municipal governments to prioritize environmental issues and devote additional attention and resources to pollution control.