Evaluating climate and air pollution control policies in emerging economies

Zhang, Haibo (2024) Evaluating climate and air pollution control policies in emerging economies. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

Environmental regulations are important tools to tackle the issues of climate change and air pollution that are increasingly severe in emerging economies. Using appropriate policy instruments plays an important role in realising the targets. In this thesis, we assess the effectiveness of environmental regulations in China, which is one of the largest emerging economies in the world.

In Chapter 2, we assess the effectiveness of early climate policy in China by causally evaluating the impact of the Low-carbon City Pilot (LCCP) on city-level per-capita CO2 emissions and CO2 intensity of GDP over the period 2003-2017. The idiosyncrasies of the policy design pose significant challenges for causal identification, which we overcome within a synthetic control framework. Contrary to previous contributions, our results suggest that the LCCP had no significant impact on either carbon emissions or intensity. The main takeaway of our empirical investigation is that even in emerging economies, effective environmental policy requires transparent, quantifiable targets, and credible enforcement.

Chapter 3 revisits the impact of he LCCP on environmental efficiency using a city-level panel dataset from 2003 to 2016. The unique design of the policy calls into question the credibility of the existing empirical analysis based on standard methods. We suggest an alternative identification framework based on synthetic control method. Contrary to the existing literature, our results suggest that the LCCP had no statistically significant increase on environmental efficiency. Nevertheless, for the first time we find a learning effect that instead increased the non-treated cities’ efficiency in the short run. We conduct a series of robustness checks to validate our results.

Chapter 4 investigates the carbon leakage induced by the air pollution control policy that focuses on PM2.5 mitigation in China – Action Plan for Prevention and Control of Air Pollution. We employ a one-to-one nearest neighbour matching technique to overcome the significant challenge posed by the policy design. Our findings demonstrate unambiguous evidence that the Action Plan resulted in significant leakage of 151 thousand tonnes of CO2 emissions each year. This translates to an annual increase of CO2 emissions by around 4.4% in the surrounding regions. We validate our empirical findings through a battery of tests. We also explore the heterogeneity of our analysis and investigate the potential economic benefits and the possible channels.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Economics
Depositing User:	Nicola Veasy
Date Deposited:	11 Jul 2024 11:26
Last Modified:	11 Jul 2024 11:26
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/95878
DOI:

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