Can congresses play a positive role in environmental governance?

We analyze panel data from 286 Chinese cities between 2003 and 2020 using a staggered difference-in-differences approach to assess whether and how budget legislation by people’s congresses impacts air quality.All original data is in the file named all_data.xlsx. the descriptive statistics is in the file named 0_Data processing and descriptive statistics.do. The left files are the modelling and processing of DID regression. Hypothesis 1 is that Budget legislation by people’s congresses facilitates environmental governance while Hypothesis 1 is that budget legislation by people’s congresses cannot enhance environmental governance effectiveness.
This study measures environmental governance levels based on air quality, using cities’ mean PM2.5 data obtained by matching NASA and MODIS satellite observations compiled by the Atmospheric Composition Analysis Group of the United States with China’s administrative division vector data.The core explanatory variable in this study is the dummy variable of the People’s Congress budget legislation. If the province to which the city belongs in the current year issues the corresponding budget supervision regulations in accordance with the Budget Law of the People’s Republic of China, it is assigned a value of 1; otherwise, it is assigned a value of 0. We find budget legislation significantly reduces particulate matter 2.5 (PM2.5) in the air by 1.58% and carbon emissions by 1.2% in pilot cities, and these findings are highly robust.This study is the first to systematically demonstrate the effectiveness of budget legislation as a tool for congressional environmental governance, an area that has previously neglected budgetary means. The findings highlight the need to enhance the budgetary authority of people’s congresses and ensure their proper roles in environmental governance.