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Environmental protection and economic efficiency of low-carbon pilot cities in China

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Abstract

Resolving the contradiction between environmental protection and economic development is essential for sustainable development. As the world’s largest developing country, China has achieved rapid economic growth at the cost of serious environmental pollution. Taking China’s "low-carbon pilot" cities as study objects, we conduct a joint analysis of air quality and productivity to investigate the suitability of low-carbon activity to the economic development model. Using the difference-in-difference method, air quality and labor productivity are set as two explained variables, and the robustness was tested with propensity score matching. We find that the low-carbon pilot measures have improved air quality, but reduced labor productivity, which proves that China's low-carbon city pilots are a "single win" model that focuses on pollution controlling and ignoring "economic incentives." The result implies that measures should be formulated according to the life cycles of different types of local development. By testing the effects of low-carbon pilot cities policy on environment and economy, this paper provides suggestions for its implement in the whole country.

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Data availability

Date sets used in this study are publicly available: the number of private cars (including passenger cars and trucks) and taxis at the provincial level in China Statistical Yearbook (2007–2017), panel data of cities at the prefecture level and above from the annual China Urban Statistical Yearbook (2007–2010 and 2014–2017) and the daily report of urban air quality by the State Ministry of Environmental Protection.

Notes

  1. The third proposal was issued in 2017, which has short time to be involved into the observation. There are 338 cities at prefecture and above levels totally in the mainland China.

  2. The division of the eastern, central, and western region of China based on geological location and economic development level. The eastern region implemented reforms and opening-up earlier, and is economically developed. The western region is economically underdeveloped. The economic development of the central region is between the eastern and the western region.

  3. Some sample cities in the first proposal have been involved into pilot list and other sample cities in the second proposal have not yet been included during 2010–2012. Then, the data during the period of 2010–2012 are excluded. The good days of the selected two periods are from air pollution index (API) and air quality index (AQI), respectively, that show different values.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Mr. Zhao Xiaowei from The State Information Center (China) for the measures about the pilot cities.

Funding

This work was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (the Research Funds of Renmin University of China) (No. 18XNLY01).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Applied Economics, Renmin University of China, Beijing, 100872, China

    Yongling Yao

  2. Business School, Renmin University of China, Beijing, 100872, China

    Xinyi Shen

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  1. Yongling Yao
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Contributions

YY: Conceptualization, Formal Analysis, Funding acquisition, Project administration, Supervision, Validation, Writing-Original Draft and Review and Editing, Visualization; XS: Methodology, Resource, Data Collection and Calculation.

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Correspondence to Yongling Yao.

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Yao, Y., Shen, X. Environmental protection and economic efficiency of low-carbon pilot cities in China. Environ Dev Sustain 23, 18143–18166 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-021-01431-y

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