Policy Instrument Types and Forest Fire and Pest Losses in China: Evidence from Provincial Policy Documents

Chinese provinces combat forest fires and pest outbreaks largely by issuing policy documents, yet whether document strength corresponds to lower disaster losses—and which instruments work—remains untested at the province level. We coded the full text of 4503 fire prevention and pest control policies (estimation window 1998–2024), scoring issuing authority, genre force, and instrument strength, and aggregated scores into province-year policy stocks by dominant type: coercive mandates, incentives, and capacity-building. Linking these stocks to forest-masked MODIS active fires and yearbook pest records in two-way fixed-effects models, we found no average association between overall strength and losses. The null masked sharp type differences: a one-standard-deviation increase in incentive strength was associated with about 7% fewer fire points, robust under wild cluster bootstrap inference and Monte Carlo simulation—although not after multiple-comparison correction across the pre-specified family; capacity-building showed weaker, inference-sensitive associations; and coercive mandates—equaling three quarters of the documents—showed none. Associations emerged with a one-year lag and tracked sustained accumulation rather than issuance. For pest losses, results were directionally consistent but weaker. After the forest chief system rollout in 2021, the overall association turned significantly negative. These results help explain why aggregate policy measures often miss policy effects.