Research on the Optimization Path of Enterprise Pollution Discharge Evaluation System Under the Pressure of Local Government Development Competition——From the Perspective of Coordination Between Economic Development and Environmental Protection

Local governments often fall into a dilemma in the development competition between "prioritizing economic growth" and "maintaining the bottom line of environmental protection". Some regions relax pollution discharge supervision to attract enterprises and boost GDP, which leads to the insufficient implementation of enterprises' pollution discharge responsibilities. The existing pollution discharge evaluation system has defects such as "emphasizing environmental indicators while neglecting economic coordination" and "focusing on static evaluation rather than dynamic adjustment". Based on the local government competition theory, environmental regulation theory, and combined with Mayer's (2021) theory of enterprise goals and performance measurement, this paper constructs a "economic - environmental" two - dimensional enterprise pollution discharge evaluation system. The feasibility of this system is verified through case analysis of industrial cities in the Yangtze River Delta and simulation tests of enterprises in Jiangsu chemical industrial parks. The research finds that incorporating indicators such as "pollution control investment intensity" and "linkage coefficient between excessive pollution discharge and economic penalties", and establishing a "dynamic adjustment mechanism for evaluation thresholds" can effectively avoid the "race to the bottom" among local governments and promote enterprises to shift from "passive pollution control" to "active emission reduction". The theoretical value of this paper lies in enriching interdisciplinary research, and the practical value is to provide local governments with an operable pollution discharge evaluation tool.