Evolutionary Game Strategies Analysis of Economic Development and Environmental Protection between Local Governments under Central Supervision Mechanism in China

Abstract

The positive interaction between economic development and environmental protection is an important social issue which concerns people’s livelihoods. In order to explore the coordinated path of economic development and environmental protection, game models are constructed, successively, between local governments and among central-local governments by the evolutionary game method, and then, numerical simulation technology is used to analyze the results. The results show that the presented evolutionary stability strategies are consistent with the three stages of economic development and environmental protection since the reform and opening up in China. From the early to the middle stage, the sum of the special governance funds and local penalty fees play a key role; from the middle to the late stage, the heterogeneity coefficient between the local governments, local environmental governance costs, and environmental pollution losses plays a decisive role; during the late stage, the sum of the special governance funds and local penalty fees and the performance appraisal indicators play an important role. According to the above conclusions, local governments tend to choose environmental priority strategy, and the central government tends to choose a loose supervision strategy to achieve coordinated development by improving the phased planning for coordinated development, appropriately increasing the special governance funds and local penalty standards, and appropriately balancing the weights of the economic and environmental indicators.