Smart City Projects Boost Urban Energy Efficiency in China

Policy makers around the world are turning to smart city projects in an effort to address the challenges of population growth, energy efficiency, and environmental sustainability. Previous studies have evaluated the effect of smart city projects on air quality. However, evidence on the impact of the projects on energy efficiency remains unclear. This study gathered prefecture-level city panel data in China, and used three strategies, namely a difference-in-differences estimator, a matching difference-in-differences estimator, and a counterfactual model using a machine learning algorithm, to assess the impact of smart city projects on energy efficiency. This study reported similar results across these strategies above. That is, after the introduction of a smart city project, energy efficiency had a remarkable and sizeable increase, ranging from 4 to 7 per cent. Moreover, this study shows that the effects of smart city projects increased over time. In addition, this study found that the effects varied according to the characteristics of the cities

Can China’s Industrial SO2 Emissions Trading Pilot Scheme Reduce Pollution Abatement Costs?

This paper evaluates the effects of China’s industrial SO2 emissions trading pilot scheme (SETPS) on the pollution abatement costs (PAC) from the past and future perspective. We apply the kernel-based propensity score difference-in-difference method to examine the effects of SETPS on the average pollution abatement costs (APAC) and the marginal pollution abatement costs (MPAC) based on the environment data from the industrial sector of 29 provinces in China over the period of 1998 to 2011. Our findings are that SETPS failed to reduce PAC as a whole. During 2002 to 2011, SETPS increased APAC by 1310 RMB per ton on average and had an insignificant negative effect on MPAC. Nevertheless, the conclusions would be markedly different if we separately investigated the effects of SETPS each year of the pilot period. The positive effects of SETPS on PAC started to appear since 2009, and SETPS significantly reduced both APAC and MPAC, especially in 2009 and 2011

Does China’s Pollution Levy Standards Reform Promote Green Growth?

Estimating the impact of environmental taxes on economic output is of great theoretical value for promoting green growth in China. Using a dataset of 232 cities from 2004 to 2014, this paper investigates the effect of pollution levy standards reform (PSR) on green total factor productivity (GTFP). We employ directional distance functions (DDF) computed by data envelopment analysis (DEA) to derive GTFP based on the Malmquist–Luenberger (ML) productivity index. Then, we investigate the impacts of PSR on China’s GTFP using Difference-in-Differences (DID) estimation. The results reveal that PSR has an inhibitory effect on GTFP, via the mechanism of technological change. Furthermore, PSR has heterogeneous impacts on different city types. The results indicate that PSR statistically significantly reduces GTFP in key environmental protection cities (KEPCs), large cities, and eastern cities, but that it has less impact on non-KEPCs, small/medium cities, megacities, and cities in central areas