Off-office audit of natural resource assets and water pollution: a quasi-natural experiment in China
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of the off-office audit of natural resource assets on the prevention and control of water pollution against a background of big data using a differences-in-differences model.
Design/methodology/approach
This study constructs a differences-in-differences model to evaluate the policy effects of off-office audit based on panel data from 11 cities in Anhui Province, China, from 2011 to 2017, and analyzes the dynamic effect of the audit and intermediary effect of industrial structure.
Findings
The implementation of the audit system can effectively reduce water pollution. Dynamic effect analysis showed that the audit policy can not only improve the quality of water resources but can also have a cumulative effect over time. That is, the prevention and control effect on water pollution is getting stronger and stronger. The results of the robustness test verified the effectiveness of water pollution prevention and control. However, the results of the influence mechanism analysis showed that the mediating effect of the industrial structure was not obvious in the short term.
Practical implications
These findings shed light on the effect of the off-office audit of natural resource assets on the prevention and control of water pollution, and provide a theoretical basis for the formulation of relevant environmental policies. Furthermore, these findings show that the implementation of the audit system can effectively reduce water pollution, which has practical significance for the sustainable development of China's economy against the background of big data.
Originality/value
This study quantitatively analyzes the policy effect of off-office auditing from the perspective of water resources based on a big data background, which differs from the existing research that mainly focuses on basic theoretical analysis.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant numbers 71934001, 71471001, 71533004, and 41771568], National Social Science Foundation of China [grant number 20ZDA084], and the National Key Research and Development Program of China [grant number 2016YFA0602500].
Citation
Ma, X., Shahbaz, M. and Song, M. (2021), "Off-office audit of natural resource assets and water pollution: a quasi-natural experiment in China", Journal of Enterprise Information Management, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/JEIM-09-2020-0366
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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