All roads lead to Rome? Carbon emissions, pollutant emissions and local officials’ political promotion in China

Carbon emissions and pollutant emissions have gradually been considered in the performance evaluation of local officials to tackle the dual challenges China faces in climate change and environmental pollution, while existing literature ignores that they are separately constrained in intensity and absolute caps, thus may actually evaluated in different ways. With the data of 239 prefecture-level cities of China in 2006–2019, our paper empirically investigates how carbon and pollutant emissions differentially affect political promotion of local officials in the same performance evaluation system. The results demonstrate that pollutant emissions mainly act as a negative moderator in the dominating economic promotion tournament, while the negative impact of carbon emissions tends to work in a standalone way and is still weaker than the role of economic performance. Moreover, this diversified performance evaluation mostly took effect when it was practically implemented since 2014, and would be largely weakened for the officials come from the upper-level government. This paper helps understand how China flexibly achieves the trade-off among economic, environmental and climate targets with diversified policy tools, and can be valuable reference for other transition economies to tackle similar dilemma.