政策工具何以缓解环境不平等？.

A good eco-environment is the fairest public product and most beneficial to people' s livelihood and well-being. Everyone has the right to enjoy a safe and healthy living environment; however, it is undeniable that environmental inequality has been a longterm problem. How to achieve efficiency and equity in environmental governance is an important issue to be further explored. Previous studies have mostly discussed the influencing factors of environmental inequality from the perspectives of race and income level, but few studies have explored the impact of policy instruments and their mixes on environmental inequality. To make up for this deficiency, this paper used the Williamson coefficient to measure the environmental inequality coefficient of 25 provinces and regions from 2003 to 2019, based on the data of SO2 emissions from 278 prefecture-level cities, and empirically examined the complex relationship between policy instruments and environmental inequality with the fixed effect panel model and the threshold effect model. It was found that: ① The overall provincial environmental inequality in China showed a trend of slowly decreasing and then rising, and there was obvious regional heterogeneity between the eastern, central, and western regions. In addition, there existed a mismatch phenomenon of improving environmental quality and increasing inequality. Therefore, how to improve the environmental welfare of the minority has become the focus of environmental governance. ② Command-and-control policy instruments alleviated provincial environmental inequality to some extent due to their focus on fairness and public demands, while market-based policy instruments significantly aggregated provincial environmental inequality due to their features of pursuing governance efficiency. ③ The higher the level of pollution and innovation, the better for command-and-control policy instruments to alleviate provincial environmental inequality. Market-based policy instruments would aggravate environmental inequality at a low level of pollution and a high level of innovation. Based on the above conclusions, this paper proposes that environmental governance should be promoted and environmental inequality should be alleviated in such aspects as paying attention to the equity of pollution distribution, designing reasonable policy mixes, and finding differentiated governance paths. This study has important implications for selecting policy instruments, improving policy-making ability, and eliminating environmental inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]