Exploring the impact of environmental regulations on happiness: new evidence from China

Lower happiness caused by environmental pollution has attracted widespread attention, but existing studies have ignored the impact of environmental governance on happiness, and hardly a research has discussed whether environmental regulations will affect happiness. To make up for the above shortfall, based on the micro data come from Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) in 2015 and the macro data of 28 provinces in China from 2013 to 2015, this study distinguishes three types of environmental regulations which are economical environmental regulation (EER), legal environmental regulation (LER) and supervised environmental regulation (SER), and the econometrical analysis of the linear relationship or potential nonlinear relationship between them and happiness is carried by ordinary least square (OLS) and ordered probit (Oprobit). Considering the time lag of policy implementation, this paper further tests the lagging effects. The results show that EER significantly improves happiness in the long run after implementation, and LER has no significant effect on happiness in the current year and the following year, while the significant nonlinear relationship appear after 2 years, whereas SER has a negative effect on happiness in the year and 2 years later. Therefore, in addition to continuing to increase government investment in environmental administration with adequate budgets, local governments should strengthen the environmental legal system and administrative accountability. And the most important of all, the government should create more avenues for public participation and pay enough attention to the supervision of the public. Finally, this research has great theoretical and realistic significance for the government to control environmental pollution.