Quantitative analysis of policy often involves a significant amount of manual reviewing, measuring and annotating comprehensive indices from policy text. For environmental policy, empirical studies rely on a variety of regulatory impact data. In recent years, a growing number of studies have suggested the use of policy output data to assess the influence in a more direct fashion. Terms such as policy strength, policy objectives, policy measures have gradually attracted more attention. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has developed an index of environmental policy stringency. Its underlying assumption is that the higher the policy intensity of a document is, the more stringency there is confronting the policy stakeholders. However, the processes of collecting and coding policy instruments are not sufficiently systematic and are somewhat fragmented. The manual process is often tedious and time consuming. It is challenging to ensure the efficiency and accuracy of quantification methods when facing a large collection of policy documents. More importantly, policy assessment is heavily dependent on policy resources. And there has been no study that systematically organizes and discloses a comprehensive collection of environmental policy data in China.

Based on this, Professor Zhang Guoxing's team, together with researchers from Western Washington University and National University of Singapore, established China's environmental policy datasets for the first time and develop a novel and systematic method to assess the policy intensity quantitatively. This indicator not only provides an excellent way to understand and appreciate China’s environmental policy system, but also a necessary data basis for continuously monitoring the policy effect and improving the environmental policy system. The dataset will facilitate the advancement of environmental policy-related research, and researchers can use it further to develop a systematic assessment of China’s environmental policies.

The relevant research result, entitled "China's environmental policy intensity for 1978–2019", was published on Scientific Data, thesub-journal of Nature on March 11 with Professor Zhang Guoxing of LUSM as the first author, his doctoral student Gao Yang, the second author, and Professor Jiexun Li of Western Washington University, and Professor Bin Su of National University of Singapore, master student Chen Zhanglei and doctoral student Lin Weichun of LUSM as co-authors. The research was supported by the key program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the general program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

The publishing of the paper marks the phased progress made in the research of China's environmental policy datasets in recent 9 years and is open to global researchers. Professor Zhang Guoxing has been committed to the development and improvement of the datasets since 2013 and has published nearly 20 high-level papers about the construction, evaluation, improvement and application of datasets in Chinese management journals such as Journal of Management Science, Management Review, System Engineering-Theory and Practice, China Population Resources and Environment, and about 10 high-level SSCI and SCI journal papers in Energy Policy, Journal of Cleaner Production, Social-Economic Planning Sciences etc. Relevant research results have been widely cited and followed by scholars at home and abroad. The researches have been supported by general program, key program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China and key program of the National Social Science Fund of China.

Link of the Paper: China’s environmental policy intensity for 1978–2019 | Scientific Data (nature.com)

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