Investment in environmental projects lowers mayors' career prospects, study finds

Investment in transport infrastructure improves a mainland mayor's chances of promotion, while spending on environmental improvements lowers them, a research paper using data between 2000 and 2009 has found.

The paper, written by a Chinese, Singapore and Canadian academics for the US nonprofit National Bureau of Economic Research, said building roads, railways and airports correlated strongly with gross domestic product growth, land prices - a major source of government revenue - and city-level cadres' odds of promotion.

In contrast, building environmental infrastructure adversely affected their careers. With other factors remaining unchanged, when investment in environmental infrastructure increased by one standard deviation it lowered the probability of promotion by 8.5 percentage points for cities' party chiefs and 6.3 percentage points for mayors, the paper said.

"Spending on transportation infrastructure immediately creates economic activity, and thus might have a more immediate and tangible impact on economic growth than would spending on environmental improvements," it said.

The paper warned that if China's top leadership really wanted to improve the environment, it had to include measurable and tangible evidence of progress towards environmental goals in formulae determining lower-level cadres' promotions and budgets.

Sheng Guangyao, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' Institute for Urban and Environmental Studies, said in an interview with the Post earlier this month that as long as the performance of officials was assessed in this way, local governments would devote more resources to transportation than the environment.

Because officials in higher-level governments, not the people, had the final say on judging a mayor's performance, they tended to focus on projects that were more easily seen and achieved results sooner, such as roads, Sheng said.