Transparency by Chinese cities reduces pollution violations and improves air quality.

ABSTRACT: We provide national-scale experimental evidence from China showing that transparency by local governments improves the management of air pollution. Governments that perform better have more reasons to be transparent, making the causal relationship between transparency and policy outcomes difficult to disentangle. In 2015, we randomly assigned municipal governments in China to a high-visibility, public rating of their adherence to national requirements for transparency about their regulation of pollution. By 2016, this treatment significantly boosted transparency in treated cities relative to control cities, allowing us to observe the effect of randomly increasing transparency in the years that followed. Subsequently, high-polluting firms in treated cities cut their violations by 37% compar

SUBMITTER: Liu M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12002021 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature