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ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Does Improving Government Auditing
Independence Promote Public Environmental
Concern? Evidence from Auditing Vertical
Management Reform in China
1
School of Economics and Management, Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, Zhejiang, China
Submission date: 2024-06-03
Final revision date: 2024-09-06
Acceptance date: 2024-10-28
Online publication date: 2025-01-22
Publication date: 2025-11-14
Corresponding author
Pol. J. Environ. Stud. 2025;34(6):8201-8211
KEYWORDS
TOPICS
ABSTRACT
Audit organizations’ independence and supervision function may guide the public’s
pro-environmental behavior. Based on panel data from 292 cities in China from 2011 to 2019, we
explore the impact of Auditing Vertical Management Reform on public environmental concerns through
a difference-in-differences method. The results indicate that Auditing Vertical Management Reform
positively affects public environmental concerns in the short term. Auditing Vertical Management
Reform enhances public environmental concern by improving government environmental enforcement
and corporate environmental information disclosure. We further confirm that Auditing Vertical
Management Reform and Public Interest Litigation Reform have a synergistic implementation effect
for the long-term enhancement of public environmental concern. Auditing Vertical Management
Reform’s impact on public environmental concern is more pronounced in cities with higher legal
development and digitization or lower fiscal pressure. These findings complement the scant literature
on the environmental effects of Auditing Vertical Management Reform, provide insights into
the relationship between the independence of audit offices and public environmental awareness,
and provide empirical evidence for other countries concerned with the management model of audit
institutions.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
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