Regional differences of Chinese environmental protection institutional system's operation — An empirical analysis based on hybrid todim method

Since Chinese reform and opening up, the total economy has kept a rapid development trend, which also makes Chinese environmental pollution problems become increasingly serious. In recent years, Chinese government has introduced a large number of environmental protection policies to alleviate the contradiction between economic development and environmental pollution. However, the economic level, resource endowment and government system of China vary from one region to another, which leads to the result that the implementation of environmental protection policies is not satisfactory. In order to achieve economic sustainable development better, each region of China needs to be tailored to develop respective environmental protection institution according to its own regional characteristics. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze and evaluate the operational effect of Chinese existing regional environmental protection institution and put forward the corresponding improvement measures. In order to evaluate the operational effect of Chinese environmental protection institution system (EPIS), the following works have been carried out: Firstly, the constitution and operational mechanism of EPIS are analyzed. The Chinese EPIS consists of the environmental laws and regulations subsystem, the environmental protection administrative institution subsystem, the environmental economic policy subsystem and the public participation institution subsystem, and the four subsystems are interdependent and interact with each other. Then, the comprehensive evaluation index system of EPIS is constructed with systemic completeness, systemic execution, ecological environment and economic development as the four criteria layers. There are total 15 indexes under four criteria layers. At last, the evaluation of the regional EPIS based on the hybrid extended TODIM (an acronym in Portuguese of interactive and multi criteria decision making) method is proposed with considering the hybrid evaluation information including real numbers and grey numbers. In addition, the novel ranking method and orthocenter distance of grey number based on whitening weight function are proposed to established hybrid TODIM methods. The empirical analysis is presented according to the data of Chinese 30 provinces in the year of 2014–2015. According to the hybrid TODIM method proposed in this paper, we get the evaluation results including completeness and operational effects of regional EPIS. In order to present the regional difference distinctly, k-means method is used to get the clustering results of regional EPIS. The clustering results demonstrate that: (1) The EPIS with excellent operational effect is mainly concentrated in the eastern coastal areas. This is mainly because these regions are relatively developed in the natural, economic, social, human and ecological environment. (2)Regions where the EPIS works moderately are concentrated in the central region. This is because the central region is close to the eastern region in geographical location, and affected by the diffusion effect of eastern region. (3)Regions where the EPIS works badly are concentrated in the western region. This is because the operation of the environmental protection system lacks a certain degree of impetus under the influence of relatively high environmental quality. According to the research on operational effect of EPIS based on hybrid TODIM method, some conclusions could be obtained: (1)The completeness and operational effect of Chinese EPIS are decreasing from east to west, showing a significant decrease in regional gradient. (2) The new ranking method of interval grey number is considering the value distribution information of grey numbers, and the new distance function is effective to measure two interval grey numbers.(3) The hybrid TODIM method proposed in this paper is valid to evaluate the operational effect of Chinese regional EPIS.