Abstract: The improvement of ecological transfer payment policy is an important part of deepening the reform of ecological compensation system. In order to solve the practical problem that the ecological transfer payment policy has not fully improved the environmental quality, corresponding assumptions are put forward based on the environmental governance of local government decision mechanism, selecting 96 counties of Shanxi Province of the environmental and social economic data, using tend to score matching - double difference method is used to evaluate the ecological environment effect of transfer payment policy. The results show that the implementation of the ecological transfer payment policy has improved the environmental quality of the counties where the national key ecological function zones are located at the significance level of 1% on the whole, but its environmental effects have gradually deteriorated over time. The expansion of the scale of ecological transfer payment funds has further improved the environmental quality.  For every additional 1000 RMB of ecological transfer payment funds, the environmental quality has been improved by 2.285 percentage points, and the environmental effects of the ecological transfer payment policies show different characteristics of functional zone types and ethnic aggregation degree. Further research found that poverty level is an important factor leading to differences in the environmental effects of ecological transfer payment policies in different regions. Based on this, from insisting on implementing the ecological transfer payment policy, gradually  expanding the scale of ecological transfer payment,  strengthening the guidance and differentiation of ecological transfer payment funds allocation, improving the ecological transfer payment policy, market-oriented, diversifying the investment mechanism and perfecting the assessment of compensation funds, such as some suggestions to perfect the ecological transfer payment policy.